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Kiki-Bouba Effect - What can it tell us?

  • Writer: Neel Byrappagari
    Neel Byrappagari
  • Mar 3, 2024
  • 1 min read


Recently, I came across an exciting phenomenon called the kiki-bouba effect. The effect was first discovered in 1924 by Georgian psychologist, Dimitri Uznadze, and further built upon by others such as V. S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard who recreated the experiment on both English and Tamil speakers. Researchers gave people from around the world two shapes, one with sharp edges and one with rounded edges, and asked them to label the shapes either kiki or bouba. Regardless of what language they spoke, a majority of them labeled the one with sharp edges kiki, and the one with rounded edges bouba. This proved that some kind of innate language made us associate certain words or sounds with certain ideas. Could this concept of associating sounds with concepts be more general? Can it also explain the origin of languages? Or can it be the basis for why some people find that some languages sound “violent”? Can certain sounds generate emotions in people?

 
 
 

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