Fifteen years ago I went to a museum exhibit on Reggio Emilia teaching methods that I still think about once a week or so. (Reggio Emilia is similar to Montessori in that it is child-led exploration but different in that encourages multiple cross-modal forms of expression to aid comprehension.)
The Reggio Emilia exhibit featured children performing a cross-modal exercise of drawing the sounds of various types of shoes walking down stairs to illustrate the "Hundred Languages of Children" concept. It showed how kids translate auditory experiences into visual ones - high heels would been drawn with spikey patterns and construction boots would be big wavey ones. This is reminiscent of the Bouba-Kiki effect. But other smaller nuances such as duration translating to span and loudness to magnitude.
I took away a fascinating insight from childhood cognition: children effortlessly bridge sensory modalities, an ability that often diminishes in adults to the point that asking an adult to “draw this sound” or “build something that feels like this smell” is met with a blank look but which a child is often completely game to try. Tasking an adult with a cross-modal assignment literally does not compute.
This cross-modal perception revealed that children possess a remarkable synesthetic intuition, using diverse forms of expression to understand and interpret the world—an ability I had completely forgotten as an adult, which hindered my communication with young children in early education environments.
It highlighted the importance of nurturing cross modal communication styles and once one notices it (like in say Mr. Rogers opening ritual to use multiple queues to engage children’s parasympathetic nervous system) one unlocks a whole new vocabulary with not just children but adults. It’s been a powerful tool in my creative toolbox since.
I wonder if the ability diminishes in adults, or if adults are more inhibited and worried about looking foolish. Try the same experiment with adults after drinking alcohol!
As a kid I instinctively associated different days of the week with colours. This is a form of synaesthesia. As an adult I never think this way, and even when I try can only even remember one of the colour associations (Friday was orange).
My cod-biological explanation is that a child's brain is still forming connections and the process of becoming an adult involves pruning many of these connections to become more focused and efficient.
My letter-color synesthesia continues to fire on all cylinders well into adulthood. It's just a form of memory association of course. I can see that this 'e' is (in my editor) white text on a muted grey background. But that 'e' is also, simultaneously, the brightest lime green you ever laid eyes on. Like #00FF00, extremely light green. Every 'e' in every word lights up in my mind's eye in exactly this color. Most vowels do the same, consonants are inconsistent, numbers are pretty strong.
It's a fun little memory trick, and it was surprising to learn that it's not a universal experience. Not just "your letter-color association is different from mine" (it seems to be highly personal) but "wait, you don't do that at all?"
While reading this comment, I was thinking "tuesday is blue, friday? Definitely orange" and then read you saying (Friday was orange) a split second later
Tuesday rhymes with blue. Not to mention "Blue Tuesday" is a phrase used quite often.
You might be associating orange with Friday because it makes you think of the sun and going outdoors?
It's all very interesting. Even more so because I don't think of days/colours. My mind gives the days size and mass. ie. starting with Sunday (I'm American) the day is small. And as the week progresses the days get larger, heavier and denser. Until Saturday, which is a big fat puffy ball of "day". You can do what you want with it and it will just be there and be your friend. I love Saturdays.
If Tuesday is blue, Wednesday is green, and Friday is orange then it would makes sense that Thursday is yellow, Monday is violet, Sunday is indigo and Saturday is red...
I'm not sure I think this illustrates different types of intelligences.
For me, looking at the image, I have to suspend disbelief about a lot of things. This is a very simplified picture of a bus, lots of elements are missing/unrealistic, so I have to try to determine what missing things are part of the puzzle and which things are just coincidence. I think children would not be able to suspend their disbelief as quickly, and will instead immediately map the image to the real world object. They don't notice that the back bumper and the front bumper are identical (which they shouldn't be) or that the back window and the front window are identical (which they shouldn't be). So looking at this image, I decided "ok so this isn't meant to be a real bus, it's some sort of puzzle, so let me look for clues about it's direction of motion."
That first part, "this isn't meant to be a real bus", is the piece that causes the difference, I believe. It's that thinking that makes it difficult to think "well what's on the other side of the bus?", because who knows, this bus doesn't have real world bumpers who knows if it has real world doors. As an adult, we can abstract and reason about a theoretical bus that might not have doors, whereas I think a child would connect that to the concrete bus and have difficulty abstracting.
I don't think this is a good example. The bus is clearly a simplified representation. If the answer/explanation given was actually correct then you'd also expect the bus to have other details like side view mirrors.
Edit: I hate to dwell on this too much, but even if a door and mirrors were visible, the bus could be in reverse. This seems to be more of a case of accidentally picking the intended answer due to a lack of knowledge. (Of levels of abstraction in representation and of vehicle design.) That said, I don't necessarily disagree with the underlying point being made.
I don't think the point is to nitpick how realistic the representation is or how fair the question is. The point is children react to the question differently from the way adults do. And that's true despite (or perhaps because of) what an adult thinks of the question.
But that's a different point to what GP was making. It wasn't that children answer differently to adults, it's that they get it 'right' more often than adults. Which is still more about ignorance allowing them to make the same assumptions as the questioner than thought processes. A child might not even be aware that people in other countries might drive on the other side of the road, and so be sure of their 'correct' answer, but most adults know that without knowing the location of this image, the question can't be answered.
EDIT: And if the question weren't ambiguous, you'd basically be telling people the answer, since as soon as you say "assume it's in the US", you give a massive clue that bilateral asymmetry is relevant.
> Why are [large vehicles] so exciting to a kid? Perhaps it is obvious: they are loud, big, fast, complex, powerful. There is the element of danger. Adaptively, there must be a survival advantage for children who are curious about loud, large, fast beings and objects.
I’d expect an adult to be more familiar with a bus by virtue of having taken the bus more often than a child. Whether or not that’s exciting or just a mundane commute shouldn’t affect familiarity.
Isn't this exactly the point? You look at this the analytical way, decide the bus doesn't have enough detail to be a realistic representation and stop there, maybe looking around for other clues. A very good example imo.
Sure, the bus could be in reverse, but it could also be a British bus driving in the US. Or we could be looking at a reflection of the bus. Or we could be looking at the reflection of a British bus going in reverse. This is not about determining the direction with 100% certainty. This is about having a clue at all which you can justify, which adults mostly don't.
Yeah, this bus is clearly intended to be a school bus but it’s missing too much detail. If the absence of the door is a valid clue, then so is the absence of the big red stop sign that is on the non-door-side.
The other day someone pointed at the open platform of RM1353 and asked me: did you take the doors off this bus? “No, it was built that way.” She looked amazed, and pleased.
I tried to find some source for this, but could not trace it back further than a YouTube video from 2016 [1], which is very light on details, to say the least.
This kind of "research" does not really warrant the amount of inspirational blog posts that has resulted from it. In fact, as an adult I tend to reject 80% of these stories as nonsense.
I think in the US kids use buses (school buses) at a higher rate than adults. The bus in the image is also colored yellow, just like school buses. Perhaps it has more to do with kids just having more recent experiences solving the same problem in real life?
Huh, it seems to me that realizing buses have doors on the side adjacent to the edge of the road is more an example of crystallized intelligence than fluid.
I actually did have trouble with that bus image. However it’s not as though adults make this trade-off for no gain.
Ask a 6-year old to spot a bird in a tree a hundred feet away and they’ll be looking around everywhere for it simply because they don’t know what they’re looking for. An adult knows exactly what to look for: a dark shape in the branches moving separately from the motion of the branches in the wind behind it, briefly silhouetted against the sky while those same branches move, probably 30 ft or higher off the ground (depending on the size of the tree, of course). You probably even know instinctively what size of thing you’re looking for based on your knowledge of the apparent angular size of a bird at a given distance you’re also instinctively able to estimate.
That bus example is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen.
Spoiler follows:
The solution is supposedly that in countries where you drive on the right-hand side of the road, children immediately deduce that the bus is traveling to the left.
This seems nonsensical to me because it's not even clear the bus is on a road, or it it is, that it's on the far side of the road. As far as I can tell, the bus is in a dirt field. Or if it's a dirt road, there clearly seems to be enough space for another bus to pass behind it.
And since there are no citations, I actually don't even believe it. I've seen enough completely made-up statistics on LinkedIn blogs that unless there's a link to a study, at this point I assume the authors are just making sh*t up.
The rationale they provide is that you can't see the door to the bus. So we are looking at the driver's side of the bus. Ignore "Which was is the bus going?" and instead ask "Which side is the front of the bus?"
And, knowing that we are looking at the driver's side because of the absence of doors, the answer depends on which side of the road the bus is designed to be driven on.
I mean I can't even tell. Because no bus looks the way the bus in the image looks.
I've never in my life seen a bus where the windshield was the same size and shape as the back window. Never in my life seen a bus that didn't have brake lights or turn signals. And so forth.
In other words, there are so many things wrong with the "bus" that I don't know why you'd assume that if the "artist" had drawn it from the other side they would have bothered to include a door.
I think you've just confirmed the post's point about overanalysis. This type of thinking is exactly why adults get it right less often than children.
Kids immediately recognize the view must be from the driver's side of the bus because they're not examining the situation. They're taking the first piece of relevant information and rolling with it. No door means passengers get on the other side, so it's going whatever way you assume traffic across the street should go based on where you live.
But there is a difference in the picture. You'd also determine that it's going left when looking at the windshields, as only the left side is completely straight.
Honestly, this image is a terrible example to illustrate their point. I think it's more likely that children are more likely to actually use public transit, which is why they'd be able to detect the missing door quickly.
I meant the small indention below the windshield that's only on the right side. The black line from the window ends slightly further out then the chassis of the bus
The bus is missing many details of a real bus, so it's clearly an abstraction that leaves out detail, meaning that it's reasonable to assume the artist may have crudely left out doors from the picture. This doesn't make the kids "right".
I think that’s it - they know they don’t know the ‘right’ way to draw sound, so instead of just doing whataver occurs to them, they wait, for fear of doing it ‘wrong.’
The concept that the only ‘wrong’ thing to do is to do nothing is a real important thing to internalize as an adult - not always where professional work is concerned, but nearly always where artistic pursuits are concerned. You’re doing it ‘right’ if you’re doing it.
My theory is that a lot of capabilities remain in the hardware stack, but they are made inaccessible by the software stack (culture mainly, but also that type of media we consume, which can act as a catalyst...or not, if the right kind isn't present/popular).
you know, i think this skill can be learned. i used to definitely have very little ability to "bridge sensory modalities", but i've been studying music and performance as a hobby somewhat seriously for about 6 years now. and i now feel like i have much more of that ability than i did before. i probably had it as a kid, just as you were saying, but i am definitely well into adulthood now :)
(there is a radio program i listen to where the guy talks about the music he plays and the context and he explains many things in this sort of "bridging sensory modalities" sort of way. and i used to always think, "that is just some straight up nonsense that he is saying." but now, i often see what he is saying very literally...)
Huh, that is pretty cool. I mean I wouldn't have any problem with trying to do that "Draw a sound", "What colour is the concept of the wind" etc. Maybe I'm just odd but it is something I just never really lost with time, I suppose.
What about the effect where for some pairs of words that don't theoretically have ordering preference (kiki/bouba vs bouba/kiki), (plus/minus vs minus/plus), (on/off vs off/on), (positive/negative vs negative/positive) have some psychological order that most people use and if the other ordering is used, it sound weird?
Even among words that do theoretically have an ordering preference, some people have different habits. I knew someone who habitually said "three or two", rather than "two or three".
Leaving aside the effect of prosody mentioned in another comment, I think the rest of it is habit, together with the brain's tendency to group things. If you're used to hearing "plus or minus", your brain may be grouping it together into a phrase whose meaning you understand directly without decomposition, so if you hear "minus or plus" there's a moment of having to map the components to the composite meaning, together with wondering if the speaker intends the difference to have a meaning.
(In mathematics, there's a reason to have both ± and ∓, since you can use them both in the same equation when you need "minus when the other one is plus, and plus when the other one is minus". For instance, a±b∓c means "a+b-c or a-b+c".)
I don't know if this has a name, but if it does I'd love to know it.
I feel like this would be less confusing if rendered as "±(a+b-c)". It's the same amount of cognitive effort for figuring out the second term/factor, but you get the first one for free.
That's not a common connotation; I've never once seen anyone use those phrases to mean that. "two or three" does not typically have any connotation of either being more likely.
Lest anyone draw the conclusion that this is a US thing, it certainly is not. I've lived in many places throughout the US and have never heard anyone say "three or two". Nor does "two or three" carry the connotation that two is likelier. A closer fit to that would be "a couple", which formally means two, but sometimes means "a small number".
Not in the UK, no. But I did live in Canada, the US and across Europe.
Not that it's commonly used and not with 3 and 2 specifically, but when used and the pair is inverted, it's meant to convey that the former is more likely. That's just like ... common sense, really.
In (US?) English if you were to describe some thing and you had many adjectives for its size, color, origin, age, a visual pattern like "polka dot" or striped, and so on - many native speakers (at least in my region) would intuitively assemble that clause in the same order as each other without really being able to clearly articulate why. There are some supposed grammar rules that inform it but in my circles people just explain it as basically due to vibes. It was definitely not anything I remember from my public school education growing up.
If I'm describing a large, heavy, square, shiny, metal, block - that's the order that feels right for me. If I try shifting any pair of those around it just feels weird and the farther apart they appear in my original ordering, the weirder the swap would feel for me. "square metal heavy shiny large block" has awful 'mouthfeel', as it were. It's also a bit jarring to hear aloud.
It's not really a hard and fast rule, but certain classes of deviation from it will certainly sound off. I don't think it's commonly explicitly taught to native speakers (at least I've never heard of it being taught in schools here) but it is, as I understand it, commonly taught to people learning English as a second language. https://icaltefl.com/adjective-order/
Big shiny square metal block doesn’t look so bad to me, but big shiny heavy square metal block does. Perhaps big it is the switch back and forth… big and heavy are fuzzily size-like characteristics while shiny is not…
Is a big shiny square metal block the same thing as a big square shiny metal block? I’m not sure. I think the former is a big square metal block which happens to also be shiny, while the latter is a big square block made of a shiny type of metal.
The exceptions to this are also interesting to see. For example, “stainless-steel hex nut” or “designer little black dress” both violate the standard ordering, which would predict “hex stainless-steel nut” and “little black designer dress”.
These exceptions tend to arise with stock phrases such as “hex nut” or “little black dress”. In that case the entire phrase, including adjectives, is treated as the noun, with additional adjectives prepended.
Well, this is because a hex nut has a purpose and it is for you to hex your lost 10mm wrench.
I would have thought that little black designer dress was correct. Designer little black dress feels incorrect. The L and BL in Little and black and then the Ds in designer and dress also lend an alliterative flow to “little black designer dress” that is not there for “designer little black dress”
I think the dress example is not super great because “little black dress” is an expression or something. It is like an accessible and inexpensive but still nice and fashionable dress.
So I think a little black designer dress would be a designer dress which happened to be little and black. A designer little black dress would be a dress of the “little black dress,” variety, which also has the trait “designer” applied.
I love the examples in your second paragraph - that helps make the point that they're not entirely commutative. Still, I couldn't write a nice generalizable rule on why I do agree with your breakdown of these examples.
It is funny that shininess is a characteristic that can be attributed to the block, or the metal that makes up the block, despite the block being made of the metal!
The adjective order thing is a bit overwrought—the basic ordering rule is "more essential qualities bind closer to head". That's not a comprehensive rule, and to the extent how saliently essential qualities should be considered is vibes-based and not culturally universal, but it does quite well at explaining some apparent exceptions ("Chinese green tea" > ?"green Chinese tea") and implications of violating the "rule".
Reading examples of unwritten rules in the English language always feels kind of unsettling to me. Like the order adjectives are supposed to appear in.
Yes. As per etymologynerd, English speakers tend to like trochaic stress rhythm in sentences, like "salt and pepper" or "lee and sophie" where a different ordering sounds weird.
I think it's entirely what we're used to. Mainly when I hear one the other way around it's a non-native speaker, but sometimes the inverted order is used for effect, e.g. A Song of Ice and Fire sounds off-kilter, like its world and characters.
That seem completely unrelated/off-topic. Those are patterns that people hear and repeat.
The article’s effect describes something that is apparently not just shared information, that is deeper.
I have always thought this association is partly from some intuition we have about the mechanical and acoustic properties of hypothetical things that would have this shape.
The shape with sharp, jagged edges would occur in real life if it were made of some hard material, perhaps, like glass, metal, etc. The shape with the soft, curvy lines would occur if it were made of something softer and possibly elastic.
It doesn't take much intuition to guess that the sharper shape will produce a sound closer to "ki," with sharp transients and lots of high frequencies - like a piece of glass or metal falling - and the rounded one perhaps closer to "bou," with softer transients and perhaps a time-varying resonant frequency as the shape is malleable (think of the sound of a drop of water landing).
The effect is somehow also visible in the shapes of the letters, with ‘B’, ‘O’ ‘U’ being rounded and soft. The letters ‘K’ and ‘I’ are made of sharper shapes featuring triangles and lines. I wonder if letter designs were influenced by the sounds made by objects.
I distinctly remember trying to "read" sentences as a small child by investigating the shape of the letters. For example, if a letter looked friendly, like like A or C, I assumed a nice message. If the letters looked serious or grave, like T, E, K or W, I assumed a bad message. If a letter looked soft like B or P or O, I assumed the sentence was about something soft, etc.
Particularly, the degree of sharpness or roundness of a particular letter may have changed a lot over time. I guess it's still possible that there's been some kind of psychological effect at certain times, but it doesn't look like it was a strong and consistent factor in the history of the alphabet.
That is because of the focus on writing itself. Its easier to make sharper letters on clay tablets, making such letters on palm leaves ( popularly used by some cultures for writing) would tear the leaf, so the writing became more rounded in these regions.
Mama/dada effect: Children everywhere in the world say mamamama as their first syllable, which is why mama means mother both in Chinese and in anglo-franco-hispanic-germanic-latin languages, and everywhere else. They then say dada, baba, papa, which is why baba means dad in both China and in latin languages.
Ramachandran and Hubbard suggest that the kiki/bouba effect has implications for the evolution of language, because it suggests that the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary. - Nonsense, mama is an easier syllable for mouths to make, that's the sound that cats make as well as cows.
While "mama" is a very common word for "mother" across languages, it is by no means universal. A particularly startling example is Georgian, where "mama" means dad, and "deda" means mom (and note that this is an Indo-European language!).
Which is to say - there's no single "first syllable" and "second syllable" that all babies say in that exact order. They just babble, and adults interpret those noises as syllables according to the phonemics of their language. Thus results may vary.
The Occam's razor explanation for the worldwide distribution of mama / dada is very, very straightforward: (a) they are the easiest syllables, and therefore some of the first and most common syllables children babble, (b) parents are extremely willing to read meaning into the sounds their children make (what parent doesn't think their kid is a little genius?), and (c) parents are eeeever so slightly self-interested in what that meaning should be.
The whole effect is probably based on the combined word-sound associations everyone acquires, not on some biological preference. For starters, there's no evolutionary reason why sounds should be associated with shapes.
You say that like it's a joke, but they're called mammals because they have mammae -- breasts, udders -- and although I don't know completely for certain I'd be flabbergasted if Latin mamma weren't very directly related to mama etc. (Wiktionary says it's from Greek "mamme" which it alleges is a back-formation from babies' "mama", and cites a learned-sounding reference, but I don't know whether anyone actually has more than conjecture here.)
And when the made up word "bouba" is presented I immediately thought of the slang word "boob" for breast so that round shape is a good fit.(Also bubble and bauble are also near sounding and round)
The cards in the game have nonsense words and illustrations. Players work through various scenarios where they try to agree about which nonsense words should go with which illustrations.
this implies that humans have an intuitive sense of the shape of the waveform, which I think would be surprising!! And also empirically testable
(not saying you're wrong, but it's not necessarily obvious to me as true. The sound is a vibration/signal, how our brains interpret it may have no correlation to its "shape". Do we have an intuition for "spiky" electromagnetic signals? maybe we do, that's why looking at nature, smooth curves and such, is empirically more relaxing for people than artificial environments..?)
Higher frequencies carry more energy, also every human has a sense of waveforms. It's called "sound".
Tonality and sound differentiation are deeply important to speech as well as for recognizing animals. Then there's music, of course :)
But I guess you were getting at some sort of synaesthesia?
Indeed an interesting question how that is related.
I was referring to waveforms because of the duality with sound
I think the surprising thing would be if the logic goes high frequency -> spiky waveform -> spiky shape, because that would imply that that particular representation of the sound is being used as part of the intuition. Which would be unusual, as it's not generally how people experience sound (for sure the opposite doesn't really occur: even someone very used to looking at waveforms will struggled to actually understand a sound by looking at the waveform to anywhere near the detail of listening to it). Even with synesthesia it tends to be associated with colors/feelings/smells etc in a way that doesn't tend to match with technical representation of sound.
I dont know if this is true. For example sine waves, saws and square waves are very intuitive to me. I think with graphical representation of sound the problem is that the experience of complex sounds is a 3 dimensional thing to humans.
When we talk about music, layers or tracks or whatever you want to call them always become a thing.
For the sound nerds: A spectrum representation also does not reflect how we experience sound. We humans/animals are so trained or born to distinguish sound sources by timbre. A spectrum analyser splits it on the spectrum of tones, not the spectrum of timbres, therefor it's still not a good representation.
Well we don’t hear in the time domain, we hear in the frequency domain. The neuron firing rate is too slow to sample audio. Our ear does a kind of Fourier decomposition. Still in a sense we’re hearing the waveform, just the Fourier decomposition of it.
Recognising red _is_ recognising its wavelength. True, we don't know what frequency we hear/wavelength we see is associate with which specific number, but that's irrelevant.
Humans are born with the capability of doing a mechanical Fourier decomposition in our ears. Knowing the amplitude at each frequency, as all humans that can hear do, gives us information about the waveform.
Sensing timbre therefore is information about the waveform. We do not have complete information (e.g. we do not sense all the phase information) but we have approximate information about the time-domain waveform.
To be more specific, lots of high frequency content means we are hearing sharp transients, so quickly changing waves. Lots of low frequency content means we are hearing smoother waves
I think it's the shapes made by your mouth and tongue to make the sounds. Rounded to make b and ou and a, and sharp corners and tongue-palate gap to make k and i. The Wikipedia article mentions a little about this.
I think it's just that bouba has o, and kiki has k. Also the b is half-round, and I is more spiky. Visual differences, not auditory.
edit: You make a round shape with your mouth in o
As an art teacher I use this effect to demonstrate how meaning in an image can be inate, as opposed to socially constructed. To demonstrate social construction I use an image of an arrow. To an Australian aborigini an arrow 'points' in the 'wrong' direction as it's directionality is derived from its semblance to a birds footprint.
One of the best TED talks ever given, by VS Ramachandran - a video describing some of the fundamental mechanisms of the brain. This video was the first time I heard Bouba and Kiki, but there's so much more going on in this talk. It's wonderful.
How amusing. The images he uses for bouba/kiki are non-standard. In fact, they were sourced from an educational rescource I made over ten years ago. So nice to see them again, though in retrospect it would have been better had I used the standard set.
Interesting. I was given a similar "test" in high school, although the names given were Kepick and Oona. But the same preference was there: "kepick" with its "sharp" sounds favored the angled drawing, "Oona" the more undulating. There were some other questions as well, such as a hypothetical about which shape was male and which female (strong preference in the class towards "Oona" being female).
So I have to ponder how bouba/kiki diverged into kepick/oona. Kinda wonder if some random schoolteacher remembered the study but didn't remember the exact names, substituted something similar, and then built it into a curriculum that got picked up by the education system.
When I hear or say K, T, or Ch, I hear a higher pitch frequency being used than B, M, L (which sounds like lower frequencies).
Humans have a psychoacoustic effect that makes higher pitch sounds perceived as being louder.
When somethting has a louder intial sound, but the transient sound is about the same, it makes it feel more snappy (like a snare, versus a kick). This is reminiscent of a jagged edge.
I wonder if this effect can be explained by the we form the "bouba"/"kiki" sounds when we speak them. "Kiki" has a sharper enunciation when using your tongue and mouth to form it, while "bouba" feels more like an open round one.
These have entered our common household vocabulary after I called one of our houseplants "a little too kiki for my liking" and was forced to explain. Humans love categories, it's great to have names for splits like this :)
I have likened this effect to “what sounds right.”
I am curious about something with German, and would love feedback from native German speakers: “gendering” on German words seems to be largely arbitrary (as opposed to the romantic languages where gendering seems to align with how the culture associates the word to a gender). My suspicion, that has “felt” correct in most cases, is that gendering in German words is largely an artifact of which article sounds the most correct with the word. Sort of how we might use “a/an” with words that have consonant or vowel starting sounds in English.
Doesn't sound plausible to me. It does seem arbitrary more than related to the sound. There is der Titel and der Tisch, but die Tinte and die Tasche, das Tier but die Tür, etc.
ETA: Having said that, certain endings strongly indicate a specific gender, e.g. for masculine: -or, -ling, -ner, -smus, -er, -ich, -ist, -ant, and -us. See e.g. here:
It's funny to me that my gut reaction was, "Oh. Why do they want that? Bouba would be such a weird tattoo compared to kiki."
I don't have tattoos. I don't really want them (I appreciate the artistry of them, but I can't stand seeing things on my skin). I don't know why I should care, never mind care the opposite way of most people.
Why has nobody mentioned Chomsky in this thread? The correspondence in the results between American English and Tamil just seems like something that should shout Chomsky. I know little about it, but some form of universality in language, and how humans see the shape of it, seems apt as a starting point.
Also Corman Mccarthy. His books carefully balance the 'sound' of the prose to help the reader imagine the story. That's why his writing has a poetic tone that drives some people crazy.
I used to experience this had a kid! Not only did words and some names have shapes, but they were quite often coloured shapes. I have quite strong memories of some of the associations I made between names and shapes. However, I have completely lost the 'ability' as an adult. I do not feel it at all.
I had some glimpses of this effect as a kid, where to me for example there was a strong association in my brain between the the letter E, the digit 3, and the colour green, especially light green. Same for C, 5, and light blue.
As an adult, if I try to more strongly tap into my flavour of synesthesia, it starts to feel "made up"; Example, if I query my brain for "what's associated with 2" the response will be "orange, (but I think I just generated that now)" so I sadly kind of dismiss it.
I had the biggest conundrum as a child. I remembered my grandmother had two dolls on her shelf, one pink and one blue. One tall and thin, one short and fat.
I also remembered that the colors "matched" the body types.
But I can't for the life of me remember if it was "pink = tall and slim" and "blue = short and fat" or the other way round. Both make sense! It's like a synesthesia blue/gold dress, all happening inside my head!
Welp. Got it wrong. I thought of a Hawaiian flower when I heard Kiki and chose the flower looking one. I can also associate bouba to mean bulbous and choose the rounder one. My brain pattern matches like crazy.
I realize that, I more meant that I was wondering if the earlier post about the game reminded anyone else about this effect (hence its Wikipedia page being posted here one day later).
It's actually fucking insane that I'm seeing this pop up on HN right now, I literally just watched a VSauce video (posted like a year ago) explaining this bouba/kiki effect!
Interesting that the words acute and obtuse seem to follow the same pattern. Etymology says they come from ancient words for needle and club. Which also follow the same pattern.
The most we can say is that some languages (notably NOT mandarin Chinese with ~1 billion native speakers, so the idea that it's ingrained in all humans is laughable at best) have a preference for giving the long bou and boo sound to rounder objects and the shorter ki and ka sounds to sharper objects, and that language affects our naming preference.
Seems very self-evident/obvious. In real life, soft, round things make soft, muted sounds. Sharp things make higher pitched, shorter sounds. The sounds of bouba and kiki reflects this.
Now I finally know where ca. 2008 communist web series sock puppets Bubu and Kiki got their names from. What a flashback: http://www.monochrom.at/kiki-and-bubu/