bouba/kiki

 An interesting piece in today's EL Gazette:

What shape are the words ‘bouba’ and  ‘kiki’, pointy or round? 

The shape of words | elgazette.com

The first research was carried out in 1929 - and repeated in 2001:

This picture is used as a test to demonstrate that people may not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily: American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India called the shape on the left "kiki" and the one on the right "bouba".

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.7  The rounded shape may most commonly be named "bouba" because the mouth makes a more rounded shape to produce that sound while a more taut, angular mouth shape is needed to make the sounds in "kiki".

Bouba/kiki effect | en.wikipedia.org

The EL Gazette shows the most recent research:

Co-author Dr Marcus Perlman, Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, commented: “Our findings suggest that most people around the world exhibit the bouba/kiki effect, including people who speak various languages and regardless of the writing system they use. “Our ancestors could have used links between speech sounds and visual properties to create some of the first spoken words and today, many thousands of years later, the perceived roundness of the English word ‘balloon’ may not be just a coincidence after all.”

And there are some great videos which show how it works:

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