Yet another Hacker News

Dogs seem to agree with humans that 'bouba' is round and 'kiki' is spiky

341 points gmays 1 day ago 208 comments

DoctorOetker 5 days ago | parent

I too would associate "Bouba" with the rounded and "Kiki" with the sharper figure, but to me this is just a relatively universal sense of continuity vs discontinuities:

the local curvature is continuous for "Bouba", every point on the curve has a single tangent, which evolves continuously as you walk along this presented curve.

For Kiki: the local curvature is discontinuous: at the inward or outward points, there are 2 tangents, so the tangent abruptly switches value when passing through this point when walking along the curve.

similarly the "B"s in "Bouba" are voiced plosives, while the "K"s in "Kiki" are unvoiced plosives.

I think people would similarily classify "Titi, Pipi, Touta, Poupa, Kouka" like "Kiki" but "Didi, Douda, Bibi, Gigi, Gouga" like "Bouba".

The vowels are obviously voiced by the vocal chord carrier wave "voice".

So when we pass through the unvoiced (T/P/K) plosives, we notice discontinuity like the discontinuously evolving tangents along the boundary curve of the figure.

Obviously mammals like dogs have a concept of continuity, topology, distance, they might get spooked by "open" stairs, because they can see between the planks, etc.

And when we hear voiced (D,B,G) plosives, the voice while muted still evolves continuously.

po1nt 1 day ago | parent

The question is how are you able to internalise the shape without ever seeing any visualisation. Why does the the bouba even evoke curvature?

notahacker 1 day ago | parent

tbf for me the Bouba evokes curvature because it makes me think of a Baobab tree. Not so sure about the dogs :)

Wolfenstein98k 1 day ago | parent

Given the 100 years of studies across cultures (and now species), it probably made you think of curves shapes before you'd ever seen a boabob tree, let alone knew its name.

WorldMaker 1 day ago | parent

Part of the fun of the experiment is questioning the nominative determinism here. Did cultures pick a name like Baobab for that tree because of something this effect is showing or is just coincidence? We don't really know. Linguists have often wondered if there is a "universal grammar" underlying even our oldest languages that we don't know the full rules of, but coincidences and convergent evolution in our languages seem to tease could exist. Kiki and bouba are one of the more interesting experiments in this space to ever get repeatable results.

dotancohen 18 hours ago | parent

  > the Bouba evokes curvature because it makes me think of a Baobab tree.

Or a bubble.

D-Machine 1 day ago | parent

Either similar underlying processing machinery (due to auditory and visual processing evolving from simpler and more interconnected processing circuits) or because when thinking of frequencies of waveforms in light/sound, visual sharpness and auditory sharpness really are the same thing (so even if they didn't co-evolve, it can be more efficient or useful to have some single underlying representation waveform representation that represents these things similarly).

po1nt 37 minutes ago | parent

This would mean that understanding "bouba" and "kiki" evolved as a concept before dogs split from us as a species.

Wolfenstein98k 1 day ago | parent

Maybe because when you pronounce a B, it's very hard to make it sound sharp. The lips rolling off one another naturally have a gentle ramp-up. It's really hard to have a sudden transient. You can record this in a free DAW and see it in front of you.

By contrast, it's very hard to make a K- sound without a sharp transient.

With B you are adding pressure to two soft tissues in contact.

With K you are adding pressure when one tissue is hard, and saliva is present (causing a relatively sudden production of the sound).

Try making B sound sharp, hard to do while saying Bouba.

Try making K sound soft, basically impossible, especially while saying Kiki.

Timon3 20 hours ago | parent

While this explains why the sounds are sharp/soft, IMO the interesting part is: why is there seemingly such a fundamental connection between "sharpness" in spoken language, and "sharpness" in our (visual) understanding of the world?

These two concepts are not fully equal, so why don't we have two different words and see them as separate concepts?

stelonix 19 hours ago | parent

I believe you're looking at this like a classic programmer and that's why you're thinking "bouba.jpg" and "bouba.wav" are two different concepts. I used to think of the bouba kiki issue from that POV too. A good (and imo better) modern analog to the human brain thought process is a LLM that can definitely match different inputs to a single concept. Also the vocal cords have very specific shapes in the vowel continuum and that alone would help explain why for humans it's simply intuitive.

There's also another comment mentioning how it works for consonants, which I believe helps explain how it might work for dogs.

Timon3 14 hours ago | parent

> I believe you're looking at this like a classic programmer and that's why you're thinking "bouba.jpg" and "bouba.wav" are two different concepts. I used to think of the bouba kiki issue from that POV too. A good (and imo better) modern analog to the human brain thought process is a LLM that can definitely match different inputs to a single concept.

Actually, I always intuitively "knew" that our brains process different sensory inputs in the same latent space. Since I was a child, words and numbers always felt like they had "shapes" and "colors" in my head, and at some point I noticed that these associations actually help with solving real-world tasks, because words that have similar mental shapes often had actual connections.

When I tried talking to others about this, nobody ever knew what I meant, so it's satisfying to see this being accepted more broadly :)

But that still doesn't answer the interesting question: why do our brains match these concepts together? Why is bouba not sharp, and kiki not round? The baby chick experiment suggests that animals need basically no life experience to make this association, so it seems to be more fundamental than "we learned it".

> Also the vocal cords have very specific shapes in the vowel continuum and that alone would help explain why for humans it's simply intuitive.

I don't think that I can feel the shape of my vocal cords when I'm speaking, and I don't have any intuitive understanding of a "vowel continuum", so I don't think this explanation really works.

> There's also another comment mentioning how it works for consonants, which I believe helps explain how it might work for dogs.

Could you link the comment you're referring to? Thanks!

stelonix 12 hours ago | parent

I do love your point because I felt like synesthesia might fit in my first comment but was not sure how to phrase it.

By vowel continuum I really only meant all vowels between A and U; basically all the vowels a human is capable of making. Even though you might not feel the shapes, your brain certainly does. There are videos that show the folds as someone speaks and you can see those shapes are deterministic.

I've realized those shapes while learning polyphonic singing. By doing the usual exercise of going from one vowel to another you begin to understand there are specific shapes for vowel sounds: O (in portuguese) is very "bouba" (round) while I is very sharp like a spear; kiki.

As for the comment on consonants, it was not made by me but I do like it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094626

Timon3 6 hours ago | parent

Ah, gotcha!

I guess our sensation of speaking could be a component, but that doesn't explain dogs apparently agreeing with us. And if you argue that dogs built a comparable association due to observing humans, then we still have to find another explanation for baby chicks.

IMO it's much more likely that this phenomenon is an artifact of our neural hardware. After all, there's no reason to assume we start as completely neutral blank slates.

crazygringo 1 day ago | parent

Because sounds are made by shapes. The shapes of our mouths and the shapes of objects colliding. And sounds have shapes, shapes over time.

willis936 23 hours ago | parent

Yes, our mouths. What's interesting about this is that dogs make sounds very differently than humans.

dyauspitr 16 hours ago | parent

Frequency and amplitude changes in the sound which change direction rapidly and significantly would generate a waveform that looks like the Kiki shape.

po1nt 39 minutes ago | parent

Dogs don't know about the frequencies or amplitudes yet they can make the connection. Why does a sound match visual stimuli with such high correlation?

CompoundEyes 1 day ago | parent

Speaking of the topological intuition of mammals I guess “Boubas” are the big soft round ones and “Titis” are the firm pointy ones.

oliculipolicula 21 hours ago | parent

Irish cíocha, and Japanese chichi (BC diet?)

wartywhoa23 14 hours ago | parent

"Sisi" for regular sized, or gently addressed, and "sis'ki" for rather large, or rudely addressed in Russian.

pezezin 23 hours ago | parent

Many human languages lack voiced plosives entirely, the most notorious one being one of the biggest languages in the world, Mandarin Chinese.

I don't think there is such a universal sense of continuity considering that tonal languages sound very discontinuous...

gitaarik 19 hours ago | parent

I think "i" and "ou" also meaningfully differ for round / sharp. To make the "I" sound, you have to restrict your vocal chords more, and for "ou" you already make a rounded shape with your lips.

DrProfresher 1 day ago | parent

As a human I agree with dogs that 'Bouba' is round and 'Kiki' is spiky.

In all seriousness, and I am surprised the article does not mention this, as dumb as it sounds Kiki has "sharp" sounds when pronouncing it and "Bouba" has a softer feel to it when pronouncing it.

As the article says it does not matter what language you speak, a word that quickly changes the sound back and forth to the same thing sounds sharp because that is how sharp things look and feel. The serration on a knife has the same angle on either side leading to a point. This is what makes sense to me as to why we correspond Kiki to something sharp.

yhjc2692 1 day ago | parent

Interestingly, even the sound of the word ‘round’ feels gentle, while the word ‘spiky’ has high-frequency peaks (at p and k)! I wonder if dogs (or for that matter, humans) can accurately zero-shot classify words that represent round vs spiky for different languages.

It appears to me that onomatopoeia, at varying degrees, played a role in the spontaneous convergence of verbal communication, and thus the development of a language.

moi2388 1 day ago | parent

When I studied psychology 20 years ago we had a class which covered this, and at least then there were studies indeed showing these associations are exactly due to these phonetic identifiers.

Angostura 1 day ago | parent

Across multiple non-European languages?

jojobas 19 hours ago | parent

You could say it has a sort of woody quality about it.

jstanley 1 day ago | parent

> In all seriousness, and I am surprised the article does not mention this, as dumb as it sounds Kiki has "sharp" sounds when pronouncing it and "Bouba" has a softer feel to it when pronouncing it.

This is just the same thing though?

It's not actually trivially obvious that different minds would agree on how "sharp" and "soft" apply to sounds and to shapes.

card_zero 1 day ago | parent

How about high frequency sounds? Kiki must be higher frequency on a spectrograph. Spikes make high frequency sounds when they hit against things. Soft round objects make low frequency noises. Sort of. (There's holes in this theory, because fur is soft but makes high frequency sounds when brushed.)

D-Machine 1 day ago | parent

It isn't trivially obvious, no, but the "k" sound is a fricative (EDIT: oops, nope, plosive - see response to this comment), i.e. the tongue rapidly moves close to the palate and then away, creating turbulence, and sounds with a sharp peak and amplitude. I.e. the waveform of a "k" or "kiki" sound looks more spiky. The opposite is the case for the "bouba" sound.

It is a bit mysterious why animals would all map e.g. sharp auditory waveforms to sharper / spiky lines (kiki figure), and then smoother sounds to smoother lineforms (bouba figure), but, reasonably, these senses evolved together and used far more shared underlying processing machinery than they do presently. After all, both light and sound reach us in waves and both carry energy.

Some primitive mush-blob perhaps just started processing all incoming energy waves together, differentiating e.g. smoother vs. more staccatto waves before making the distinction between e.g. sound vs. light. Or I dunno, but IMO it makes more sense when you consider evolution, and don't just look at processing now in isolation from the likely development of these senses.

jjtheblunt 1 day ago | parent

k is a plosive, not fricative: there's a discontinuity in the flow of air, not a friction-sounding continuous airflow. that fits your point though, regardless.

D-Machine 1 day ago | parent

Oops, you are right! Thank you for correcting. I checked before posting that some "k" sounds are indeed fricatives, but they definitely aren't in "kiki".

card_zero 1 day ago | parent

Well /b/ is also a plosive. :) Phonetics is out to sabotage your meaning.

If I stick to the more familiar territory of bad speech synthesis on 8-bit computers using envelopes, /k/ probably starts with a burst of white noise.

D-Machine 23 hours ago | parent

> Well /b/ is also a plosive. :) Phonetics is out to sabotage your meaning.

Lol, true.

Cordiali 1 day ago | parent

The 'b' sound is a plosive too, by the way. It's voiced, vs the voiceless 'k'.

But the place of articulation kinda flips, from rear consonant/front vowel (kiki), to front consonant/rear vowel (bouba).

If you flipped the voicing, it'd be 'gigi' vs 'poupa', which to my ears at least, is a lot less clear cut.

D-Machine 23 hours ago | parent

> The 'b' sound is a plosive too, by the way. It's voiced, vs the voiceless 'k'.

Yeah this I know, by "bouba" being opposite I meant the waveform.

Really the phonetic terms here are not actually relevant and have betrayed me. It's more that the 'k' sound is "more [ex]plosive" in that it seems to build up more pressure and turbulence (probably as you say, because the consonant is in the rear, so pressure builds and bounces around in the mouth more, whereas the "b" just mostly blasts out the front more quickly). And the "k" surely has a more peaky / spikey waveform in the audible range.

Waterluvian 1 day ago | parent

When I want to avoid startling my cat I make sure that the sound of my presence is gradual and not sudden. The syllables of a bouba word all introduce themselves smoothly and not suddenly.

I’ll rush to posit something for others to poke holes in: the definition of a Kiki word is a word where the syllables have a sudden “attack” then decay. And that’s a function of sound, not language.

_kulang 1 day ago | parent

Sure it is. Fourier transform - Bouba and Kiki are far from the same there. And as someone else mentioned, time domain content - attack and decay. There are physical differences in the sounds which are pretty fundamental and can be definitionally linked to sharpness and softness across domains, especially as sharp objects are defined in nearly exactly the same way (except spatially).

It would be more interesting if we had two sounds which didn’t have such apparent objective differences giving rise to specific and universal subjective differences, or if something that was not so cross domain elicited a different response, e.g. linking volume with sharpness as opposed to something like size.

lopis 14 hours ago | parent

Depending how you pronounce bouba and kiki, they are actually very similar sounds. 2 syllables made with sudden stops of air - one by the lips, and the other by the throat. The attack and decay are very similar too. There's no obvious reason why we call one "sharp" and the other "soft".

cowlevel 9 hours ago | parent

So why is a spiky Fourier transform related to a spiky object? Are dogs visualising the frequency domain signal in their heads and seeing that it is spiky?

gsich 1 day ago | parent

>It's not actually trivially obvious that different minds would agree on how "sharp" and "soft" apply to sounds and to shapes.

Same genetics produce the same outcome (mostly).

dang 1 day ago | parent

Related. Others?

Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105198 - Feb 2026 (107 comments)

Which is "Bouba", and which is "Kiki"? [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46572742 - Jan 2026 (23 comments)

Bouba / Kiki Effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45320327 - Sept 2025 (2 comments)

Bouba/kiki effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40699583 - June 2024 (170 comments)

Bouba/Kiki Effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27885703 - July 2021 (94 comments)

Bouba/kiki effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372550 - Sept 2014 (1 comment)

dang 1 day ago | parent

These might also be loosely related (since bouba/kiki came up in the threads):

Why ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ Sound So Similar in So Many Languages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605239 - March 2022 (1 comment)

Words known better by males than females, and vice versa - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30275159 - Feb 2022 (650 comments)

Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20830940 - Aug 2019 (21 comments)

Ability to identify genuine laughter transcends culture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634212 - July 2018 (2 comments)

Molyneux's problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16778983 - April 2018 (68 comments)

Distant languages have similar sounds for common words - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12510720 - Sept 2016 (60 comments)

Are We All Synesthetes? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=634989 - May 2009 (9 comments)

Oohs And Aahs: Vowel Sounds Affect Our Perceptions Of Products - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=54318 - Sept 2007 (4 comments)

sweetdingoes 1 day ago | parent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_scroll

dizhn 1 day ago | parent

For me kiki is more red than spiky.

jurf 1 day ago | parent

(Oh, this is one of my favourite yet absolutely pointless pastimes.)

I must respectfully disagree; kiki is brown, not red, but it’s an easy mistake to make

n4bz0r 1 day ago | parent

We're about to land in kaka territory with this one.

Timon3 20 hours ago | parent

That's fascinating, for me kiki is yellow, and bouba is blue. But it's possible that those colors were used in the visualizations I saw when first learning about it.

dizhn 16 hours ago | parent

Bouba is yellow. It might be a cultural thing. Yellow and cushiony but not uniform. Likea blob more than a pillow.

ralusek 1 day ago | parent

Kiki is black and gay https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/kiki

ctln 18 hours ago | parent

for me, kiki is blue and bouba is pinkish-red

throw9394030 1 day ago | parent

> Each dog/owner pair entered a room set up with a screen and a speaker to the left, and another screen and speaker to the right.

I do not think this is realible experiment. Dogs are very sensitive to non verbal cues from their owner.

For example if owner is scared, it will defend the owner. I get assaulted all the time, by dog owners who unleash their dogs on me, in self defense.

Edit: just to clarify

I get assaulted about once a week, while running at park at morning. I was at hospital a few times, mostly it is unwanted physical contact.

It is leash only park full of runners, I have no idea why any sane person would allow dogs to run freely there!

I can not afford to move out. I started wearing body cam, and air horn.

preommr 1 day ago | parent

> I get assaulted all the time, by dog owners who unleash their dogs on me, in self defense.

???

pixl97 1 day ago | parent

Just your average run of the mill HN serial killer.

throw9394030 1 day ago | parent

Dog owners are really scared of runners.

JumpCrisscross 20 hours ago | parent

If this isn’t a parody, I strongly recommend speaking to a professional about this.

throw9394030 17 hours ago | parent

That is what dog owners claim! They harass people in "self defense"!

JumpCrisscross 14 hours ago | parent

My town is debating a new offleash policy. Reading your comments, I’ve shifted from offleash in parks only to offleash in most public areas.

I genuinely wonder if I could train an LLM to comment on local news stories with a similar strain of hysterical hyperbole, because it clearly works to portray folks who want dogs on leashes more of the time as nutters.

throw9394030 13 hours ago | parent

Like dog owners respect leash laws or anything. Shiting on private property is also forbiden. Dog owners will shit on your front yard just for talking to them, and even organize harassment campaign on social media, to get more owners to shit on your front yard!

What you will do next? Shit on grocery store or restaurant? Already happened!

Thanks to people like that we need more cameras everywhere!

JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago | parent

I don’t own a dog. But I did just flash these comments in a town forum. (At the very least they got a laugh.) If this represents the mood of folks who want restrictive leash laws, they should be repealed.

hansvm 18 hours ago | parent

It sounds to me like inflammatory language around a real problem. As a rule of thumb, the people who ignore leash laws are more likely than average to have not bothered to train their dogs to be safe off-leash. I've had a few dogs bolt from their owners toward my dog and I before (normal suburb, normal locations like the dog choosing to cross a downtown road to our sidewalk from theirs), teeth bared, barking, growling, etc. In my case, I'm big, strong, and scary looking, so I just lift my dog high enough the attacker can't reach, stomp toward it, and yell something like "hey," and it'll usually back off and whimper a bit. My wife can't lift our dog easily or scare other dogs though, so our dog has been bitten a couple times when she's been out walking.

There's one person in the area who seems to have a revolving door of dangerous dogs available he likes to keep off leash. Every time the police take one away for mauling an elderly man or whatever he finds another. He lives in an RV though, and CA's relationship with the homelessness problem is complicated, so he keeps getting a slap on the wrist.

throw9394030 17 hours ago | parent

What is inflamatory? Assault is well defined! Leash laws are are well defined. You used word "attacker" yourself!

The only inflamatory is police does not take away the owner as well!

hansvm 9 hours ago | parent

- "Assaulted," both in the legal definitions and in popular usage, isn't synonymous with "attacked," and I suspect that's where some of the strays you caught in the comment section came from. Even if correct, that's a different bar to clear.

- The dog attacking is different from the owner causing the dog to attack. The latter is a higher bar to clear, and one people are going to want more evidence for. It's also incongruous when paired with the word "assault" with some other parts of your post. In particular, "let their dogs run off-leash" doesn't evoke the same mental image as "unleash their dog and tell them to attack." Your comment has the former and has language indicating the latter. People pick up on that sort of thing. For that matter, when trying to defend you to that one commenter I had to make a guess as to which interpretation of what you wrote is the most likely way to resolve that verbal inconsistency, and I might not have gotten it right. Maybe you really do get intentionally attacked by people unleashing their dogs on you. If so, why write about free-range dogs roaming around as it pertains to the attack problem?

- Active assault is also different from self-defense and from dogs accidentally picking up non-verbal cues.

And I focused on the "dogs attacking" part of your comment in that defense, but in the context of the article, your initial point was that dogs are sensitive to nonverbal clues, your evidence was that you've been attacked, yet the experiment had what I think is stronger evidence in that they explicitly controlled for that effect. Attacks happen for many reasons, potentially including nonverbal clues. Do they happen exclusively because of a sufficiently extreme sensitivity to nonverbal clues that the experiment's control wouldn't apply? Probably not? I imagine a lot of the people who gave you flack for the way you wrote about those attacks took that into account. The structure was "<A> evidenced by <B>" when that evidentiary link is tenuous and <B> is a bold statement about something that's clearly distressed you. That comes across more as an uncontrolled rant and makes people less likely to believe <B> in its entirety, whether true or not, and whether that intellectual habit of the readers is justified or not.

Independent of any linguistic nitpicking, I'm sorry you keep getting attacked. Stay safe out there.

throw9394030 8 hours ago | parent

Unwanted touching is an assault. Jumping on someone and knocking them over is attack. I am victim of both. Both are well defined legaly.

The self defense and off leash is claimed by dog owners as an "apology". It is not something I invented. Again, I am the victim here, I do not have obligation to study excuses of some street bullies! I just want to get out of there!

> Your comment has the former and has language indicating the latter....you wrote is the most likely way to resolve that verbal inconsistency..

I think i am very consistend i hate both.

> If so, why write about free-range dogs roaming around as it pertains to the attack problem?

Because it is relevant to an attack? Dog on leash can be avoided and will not ambush person from behind!

> Attacks happen for many reasons, potentially including nonverbal clues. Do they happen exclusively because of a sufficiently extreme sensitivity to nonverbal clues that the experiment's control wouldn't apply? Probably not

Some dog wizardy, perhaps telepathy. Dog can sense owner is scared of ducks, so it hunts it. Perhaps they can pass whst they hesr to owner.

I simply do not buy anything about dogs, if owner is in the same room.

hansvm 7 hours ago | parent

Definitions vary from state to state, but it's common for the legal definition of assault to require both willfulness and the knowledge that application of force will arise from your actions. You seem to think that bar has been reached by nonverbal cues. It might have been. It's different from just unwanted touching (indeed, often not actually requiring contact). Legal definitions aside, "assault" in popular language is also not just unwanted touching.

What your story does show is negligence causing injury. That's still bad. Nobody's condoning that.

That all said, I don't have a dog in this fight so to speak. Best of luck.

Izkata 5 hours ago | parent

> but it's common for the legal definition of assault to require both willfulness and the knowledge that application of force will arise from your actions

Based on their other comments, they apparently do actually mean it like that: dog owners are intentionally using their dogs to attack runners, then claiming "self-defense" out of fear of runners.

I have never heard of this before, either.

D-Machine 1 day ago | parent

> I do not think this is realible experiment. Dogs are very sensitive to non verbal cues from their owner

If you had actually read the article, they explicitly tested for and controlled this...

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 1 day ago | parent

FTA:

> The second experiment, which involved 19 other dogs, was identical in design except that the owners wore headphones playing rock music to stop them from hearing the 'Bouba' and 'Kiki' sounds. The idea here was to remove any owner cues the dogs might have been following.

So they at least attempted to account for it.

Also, why do owners feel the need to unleash their dogs at you in self defense? This is very strange.

idiotsecant 1 day ago | parent

You seem like a perfectly reasonable not crazy person.

throw9394030 1 day ago | parent

I am just running at park every morning, nothing crazy like randomly assaulting strangers!

RugnirViking 1 day ago | parent

you get "assaulted" "all the time"!? surely this is hyperbole. If not, perhaps consider moving somewhere far away from where you live now, immediately!

fooker 1 day ago | parent

This phenomenon has a famous name, the clever Hans effect.

leoc 1 day ago | parent

Good boys! Good boys.

profsummergig 1 day ago | parent

Is 'bouba' pronounced 'bowba', 'bohba', or 'booba'? And why isn't it spelled like that instead?

Permik 1 day ago | parent

Because English is the odd one out with the non-obvious mapping of sounds to character.

Wolfenstein98k 1 day ago | parent

Definitely. Something more onomatopoeiac like Chinese would be much clearer.

D-Machine 1 day ago | parent

I was taught it was "BOW-ba" or "BOH-ba", but AI actually linked a number of studies that seems to confirm it is supposed to be and usually is "BOO-ba" (i.e. bulging eyes Pepe) in experiments. I don't personally think either pronunciation would change the results though.

ErroneousBosh 1 day ago | parent

I didn't choose the wug life, the wug life chose me.

enjoyyourlife 21 hours ago | parent

Page 154 for the uninitiated: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/243750735_The_Child...

WorldMaker 1 day ago | parent

The strange spelling is partly intentional to make sure that people read it as a very fake word with no known definition. In English bow, boba, boob are all real words.

Izkata 5 hours ago | parent

The first time I heard of this effect like two decades ago, it was using the words "takete" and "maluma".

Aside from this bouba question, Kiki is a name. I've also wondered why these two words are used so often when talking about the effect, when they're both much more easily associated with something than takete/maluma.

gste 1 day ago | parent

I think objects with these shapes make similar sounds in the real world. Sharp shapes make percussive sounds. Round shapes make softer sounds.

Dog's have very good hearing, and their hearing must help them to model the world around them, to understand what different objects in the world are.

So I think it's less about linguistics and more about our audiovisual mapping of the physical world.

Then again, that must be where the origin of language evolved from in the first place.

Wolfenstein98k 1 day ago | parent

Do they though? Or is that biased by having seen wavelengths?

SamBam 1 day ago | parent

Young kids follow our same expectations with kiki and bouba. They haven't seen wave traces.

fwip 23 hours ago | parent

No, but the person proposing "it might be due to the sounds that objects of those shapes make" has.

jolmg 23 hours ago | parent

> Or is that biased by having seen wavelengths?

You don't need to. They probably mean how rounded objects tend roll or slide, and spiky objects tend to scrape at most or dig into a crevice and so abruptly stop with a shorter sound.

potsandpans 1 day ago | parent

> So I think it's less about linguistics and more about our audiovisual mapping of the physical world.

There's probably an overlap that makes the distinction fuzzy.

p-e-w 23 hours ago | parent

There’s an overlap, but the observation from the parent comment turns this widely cited phenomenon from a supposed mystery or deep insight into something trivial.

It’s like observing that humans across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog and the word “miaw” refers to a cat… no shit.

potsandpans 22 hours ago | parent

I don't think the insight is trivial, but to each their own I suppose.

Timon3 21 hours ago | parent

I hope you understand that just because a proposed explanations makes intuitive sense, it doesn't automatically have to be right.

Edit - it seems there's evidence that this intuitive explanation is wrong, see the article linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50146562

This is why I like to remind myself that the world is much more interesting than I often think, which is why the drive to jump to simple and boring explanations can often be a trap.

p-e-w 18 hours ago | parent

As I get older, I consistently find the world to be far less interesting than I used to believe. So many factoids that I once marveled at have turned out to be false or exaggerated, or now seem pretentious and forced to me even if they are true.

It’s been a long, long time that I heard something new and was genuinely, deeply amazed rather than just filling it away into the endless gallery of things I’m supposed to be amazed by according to others.

javier123454321 18 hours ago | parent

Dont know how old you are or what age has to do with it. But i find that as I get older simple factoids about the world are even more amazing. There are 4 forces we know of. Strong, weak,electromagnetic and gravitational. Thats magic and that gets more interesting the more you meditate on it.

It means all matter is acting on each other at all times. It means your existence, acting through your will changes the universe, because something as simple as moving tweaks this balance.

Its the same with so many things like the water cycle or other seemingly boring elementary concepts of our reality.

p-e-w 11 hours ago | parent

> There are 4 forces we know of. Strong, weak,electromagnetic and gravitational. Thats magic

Is it? I used to think so myself, but nowadays I realize my reaction was just imitating what others had shown me was an “appropriate” response to this.

Whether there are 4 fundamental forces, a single one, or 100, none of these help me understand the world in any sense I actually care about.

javier123454321 8 hours ago | parent

I shouldn't use the word magic in a forum like this, last time I did something similar, it also got caught up with the semantics. I mean awe inducing. I've been doing the exercise of writing poetry and one thing that I love about the process is that you can absolutely find inspiration in the banal everyday things.

By the way, this mode of being makes me happier so I invite everyone to take a second and actually consider the question "how is this magical?" for everything. It can be a beautiful experience.

I've met amazing buddhist masters who have meditated for decades that describe the world in these terms. They are also the happiest and the people most oriented towards helping others that I've met.

p-e-w 6 hours ago | parent

What exactly about it is “awe-inducing”? There are four fundamental forces. Okay. Not three, not five. Just like there are five Platonic solids, rather than four or six.

Now what? What am I supposed to feel awe about? Are you sure you aren’t just echoing words you’ve read in a popular science book?

To be clear, I have myself parroted such soundbites for decades. But at some point I asked myself what I was actually trying to say when I said them, and came up empty.

javier123454321 3 hours ago | parent

You're not the first time that someone in this site tries to argue with me that I should not look for beauty and wonder. I'll do it anyway and am not interested in arguing with strangers about what deserves being open about to wonder and interest.

I do find it interesting the fact that there's some kind of order that happens to make the world the way it is and not some other way. That's enough.

Timon3 14 hours ago | parent

I'm not surprised that this is your experience if you approach interesting questions with the attitude from your original comment.

jamiek88 12 hours ago | parent

I’m doing my very best not to fall into these deep mental and physical ruts or grooves.

It’s part of why time seems to accelerate when you age too our brains only record novelty and new experiences. Drive the thousandth time to the store, won’t remember even going. Do something new - suddenly the weekend seems long.

Jweb_Guru 9 hours ago | parent

Then you aren't actively seeking out interesting things.

p-e-w 6 hours ago | parent

“You either agree with me or you are doing something wrong.”

pbh101 21 hours ago | parent

Interestingly, in practice different languages tend to have markedly different common representations of animal sounds.

jonpurdy 20 hours ago | parent

In Korean, dogs say meong (멍), sounds like mung) rather than woof.

jolmg 19 hours ago | parent

In Spanish, they say "guau" (pronounced like "wow")

sans_souse 18 hours ago | parent

in English i say UAUH? (pronounced like Tim from Home Improvement)

wartywhoa23 14 hours ago | parent

"Gav" in Russian (sounds like "guff" :)

bryanrasmussen 11 hours ago | parent

in English you say bow-wow. And a lot of other potential words.

king_crimson 17 hours ago | parent

In Romanian the dog says 'ham ham'

p-e-w 18 hours ago | parent

Sure, and not every single person agrees with the proposed phonetic shape-matching either, but the broad trend does hold and there is similarly in animal vocalizations even across unrelated languages.

jamiek88 12 hours ago | parent

No, actually it doesn’t. You are just wrong here. Amazing that your ‘older’ brain that ‘sees through it all’ won’t let you admit it and is actually just a necrotic defense or superiority mechanism. Genuinely very alarming to me and a huge warning not to let myself get like this.

Izkata 5 hours ago | parent

Scroll up a bit. People posted examples mostly confirming they're right. Korean seems to be the odd one out.

wongarsu 15 hours ago | parent

Most animal sounds do not actually map that well into the range of sounds we use for human language. And even if they did, you would end up with different representations because different languages use different sets of sounds. Not to mention most animals make more than one kind of sound

But all of that doesn't mean that someone who has never heard English wouldn't be able two tell which of "woof" and "miaw" is supposed to be the cat

cortic 12 hours ago | parent

>across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog

Mexican / Spanish its Guau-guau or "wow-wow". Russia its tyaf-tyaf. Mandarin Chinese its wāng wāng. Few if any cultures that don't speak English know what 'woof' is.

bryanrasmussen 11 hours ago | parent

obviously the idea is not that all cultures have the same word for the sound that a dog makes, but rather if you ask people from cultures which is the sound a dog makes "woof" or "miaow" assuming they have these concepts for the animals they would say "woof".

I am not arguing this is the case, but the original poster obviously feels it is, connecting it to the top level post's idea of common ideas for what words describe over languages.

ivanjermakov 21 hours ago | parent

Does it mean that Kikis smell/taste pointy too?

CSSer 21 hours ago | parent

I mean, at least the way I imagine it, yeah. It instantly made me think of one of those spiky seed pods in my mouth.

Razengan 20 hours ago | parent

What about kaka?

MasterYoda 19 hours ago | parent

I can confirm that "kaka" taste good. It is the Swedish word for cake/cookie :)

moltar 19 hours ago | parent

In some Slavic languages it means “poopoo”.

hansvm 18 hours ago | parent

Are you agreeing, disagreeing, or saying that more experimentation is needed?

dotancohen 18 hours ago | parent

It's from a PIE root and found in one form or another in most European languages.

wartywhoa23 14 hours ago | parent

And interestingly it's often related to circle and bread in many languages:

Pi, Pie, Pide, Pita, Pizza, Piadina, Pirog (Russian for "pie"), Piscina (circular basin), Pipe.

Also, some Russian words for organs that have to do with piss (which are naturally circular) also start with "Pi".

Gormo 11 hours ago | parent

"PIE" in this sense being an abbreviation for "Proto Indo-European".

wartywhoa23 11 hours ago | parent

Missed that, but so apt anyway!

rags2riches 18 hours ago | parent

If you shorten the first vowel in "kaka" you get "kacka", which means "to shit" in Swedish. From the latin "cacare".

sejje 17 hours ago | parent

caca - shit - spanish

pjerem 14 hours ago | parent

Same in french.

aacid 14 hours ago | parent

I has no idea about the latin word cacare... In Slovak "to poop" is kakat...

saidnooneever 12 hours ago | parent

kakken in dutch xD

throw310822 16 hours ago | parent

You yell me in Sweden you can have kaka and fika?

villeb2 15 hours ago | parent

Kaka is often a part of fika.

sans_souse 18 hours ago | parent

Less zag than Kiki with the same zig

saghm 12 hours ago | parent

I read something a while back about curse words more commonly using hard, visceral consonants because it's a lot more satisfying to say them in anger or frustration. Really hitting the end of the f-bomb or the beginning of "crap" feels better than saying something like "aw, jelly belly". Even something like "gosh" instead of "god" just doesn't feel as satisfying.

None of this is scientific (at least, not my attempts to describe it), and I don't have a good explanation for every swear or epithet, but I don't think it would be as satisfying to say "that's lubu!" instead of "that's caca!"

dnpls 7 hours ago | parent

kaka no good

dyauspitr 16 hours ago | parent

Between Kiki and Booba, which one is sour and which one is sweet? I bet we’re all going to pick the same answer.

edanm 11 hours ago | parent

Very curious what people think about this.

jareklupinski 9 hours ago | parent

kiki sour

telephone3 9 hours ago | parent

sourness is a pointy quality. sweetness is more rounded and smooth.

Antipode 9 hours ago | parent

Both of those words are one letter removed from English words for a thing that is sour and a thing that is sweet, which feels like it's going to significantly bias the results on its own.

epiccoleman 9 hours ago | parent

This comment nerd-sniped me and I still have not figured out what the english words in question might be.

malfist 8 hours ago | parent

Probably kiwi for the sour thing, though it's plenty sweet too. Not sure what the other word is. Maybe bouba as in the sweetened chunky tea?

gavinray 7 hours ago | parent

Kiwi and Boba (tea)

MarkusQ 9 hours ago | parent

My best guess (rot13, to avoid spoilers) is xvjv & obbol?

freedomben 7 hours ago | parent

encryption broken by length analysis :-)

Izkata 5 hours ago | parent

The second one had also crossed my mind just as a funny though, but I looked it up and apparently it is sweet. Though I was thinking oboof.

RHSeeger 7 hours ago | parent

My first thought was that kiki would be spicy.

functionmouse 7 hours ago | parent

Absolutely. Pickles taste kiki. Pumpkin pie tastes bouba. All sensory inputs can be mapped as waveform.

Andrex 7 hours ago | parent

This assumes everything is named after what it is, Pokemon-style. Which can't possibly be true for the entirety of the English language... :thinking:

Yajirobe 14 hours ago | parent

Why do baby chicks also showcase this effect? Do they also have a great audiovisual mapping of the world?

junon 13 hours ago | parent

I'm just a parrot owner and have no sources for this, but I'd be surprised if they didn't. Birds are very sound-oriented, have to make split second decisions while in the air to avoid collisions and to react to flock calls while they're moving, etc.

At least in parrots, they love playing with sounds. They'll bang things, tap on things, throw things around, and even scream into different objects just to hear the difference. They also have decent object permanence, speaking anecdotally.

jrm4 7 hours ago | parent

Right? I was a little put off by the implication in the beginning that they're arbitrary. Of all the things in nature, even, if you throw them against a wall, the spiky thing will definitely sound more like kiki, etc.

fluoridation 6 hours ago | parent

Isn't the point of the concept to point out that they're not arbitrary?

thomastjeffery 6 hours ago | parent

Objects are not real, because reality is not objects. Reality is not each of the objects fit together, it's the complete undivided universe. We use objects to tell specific stories about that universe, not the other way around.

We can't tell a story about our sensory experience without first drawing arbitrary distinctions to divide it, and objectifying those distinctions. The very notion of a percussive sound is dependent on our arbitrary differentiation of that pattern as separate from other sound experiences. That boundary isn't discovered, it's optimized. The fact that we can categorize so many different instances of sound as "sharp" isn't because sharpness was already an inherent object to discover: it's because our notion of "sharp" has been optimized to match many instances of a consistent pattern. We eventually use the same word for sharp flavor, because that relative similarity in experience is the implication we are communicating in the first place.

A sharp object will always make a sharp sound. This is an objectively true implication: that same object won't suddenly make a dull sound, because sound is physically shaped by the objects it moves through. The mistake is to assume this objectivity extends to the very definition of those objects. We could just as easily tell a story about a blarp object, where "blarp" means sharp and blue. That boundary is perfectly valid as an object in a story: it's just sub-optimal, because the experience of blue is irrelevant to the experience of sharpness. Every time we compare blarp objects with others, we are wasting effort, carrying the baggage of redundant blueness. We do this all the time, and we don't like it. Language will never be perfectly efficient, because there are too many subjects involved to relate them all precisely; and too much commitment to familiarity to update the language quickly.

znnajdla 6 hours ago | parent

Language did not evolve gradually. Linguists like Chomsky have pretty strong evidence that language appeared suddenly — there are no “intermediate” or “less grammatically complex” languages anywhere in the world even among long uncontacted tribes. All evidence of language and culture suddenly appears about 100,000 years ago in the archaeological record. The evidence supports a more “Adam and Eve” creationist theory of human origins if we take human to mean “language”.

jmull 6 hours ago | parent

You’re talking about the transition to modern language. While there may (or may not) have been a large single step around 100,000 years ago, the subject here is the common foundation that preceded it.

You don’t have to have much experience with dogs to know they understand words and very basic sentences around things they care about and understand (food, going for walks, prey, “business”, approval/disapproval).

treyd 5 hours ago | parent

My understanding is that while dogs can understand words and put them together to understand basic (even novel) commands, they do not generally have a comprehension of syntax, which is an essential part of language. To them, a sentence is just a bag of concepts bundled together without structure.

gste 5 hours ago | parent

In terms of the human evolutionary record, we have no idea what our ancestral species spoke like, compared to say a chimpanzee. None of them are around to tell us.

My intuition tells me that human evolution grokked language. Maybe like GPT it very quickly went from being complete gibberish to freakishly coherent. A handful of words and grammar rules leads to remarkable complexity. But that's a guess.

aidenn0 38 minutes ago | parent

I'm no linguist, but it seems to me that syntax could be divorced from vocabulary.

moritzwarhier 6 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

rfgplk 1 day ago | parent

Which is spikier qktqb or rrqtyun? For me personally, rrqtyun is spikier although certain models seem to disagree. GPT (Astra) believes qktqb is spikier.

This one is also a curiosity

> isn't klop right at the edge between spiky and round

> Yes. “Klop” is borderline, but leans slightly spiky.

amelius 1 day ago | parent

But what does AI think?

vuurmot 21 hours ago | parent

AI doesn't think

minis_bot_17923 1 day ago | parent

Fun how deeply sound symbolism seems wired in - if even dogs map bouba to round and kiki to spiky, the effect is probably older than language itself.

gnabgib 1 day ago | parent

Fun(ny) how genai this comment is

throwaway27448 23 hours ago | parent

They've shifted their em-dash usage to the british standard (any dash+spacing on either side for no discernable reason—probablt a typesetting detail that hasn't made sense forever) and it looks like shit. I know, like other british standards—it's still sad to see.

throwaway27448 23 hours ago | parent

That such a phenomenon is easily visible in waveform make this pretty expected. Animals likely evolved to discretize audio long before mammals showed up

tdb7893 23 hours ago | parent

Somewhat more surprising to me is there's already evidence for this in baby chickens so it appears to exist even across very different animals.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7188

barkut 20 hours ago | parent

My fellow Frenchmen, do we tell them about Booba and "kiki" ?

ekianjo 19 hours ago | parent

Oof, the statistical power of 19 subjects is... not great

donjapan22 18 hours ago | parent

This is a fascinating article and I’m not casting shade but more of a curious question: If humans are the ones that generally associate this sound with that thing, knowing dogs are very observant of us, how do we know the dogs aren’t just copying what we are unknowingly exhibiting toward them throughout their entire lives? I have no idea how you’d pull that out of the stats though. Maybe you could find languages that have different sounds for round and spiky and compare dogs from those households to English speaking households (or rather languages with k’s for spiky and b’s for round)

iterance 17 hours ago | parent

For what it's worth, it's not an unreasonable conclusion a priori, though no comment on the methods here. The bouba/kiki effect has been demonstrated in newly-hatched chickens in controlled experiments.

xdertz 14 hours ago | parent

It is the counting horse all over again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

dgan 12 hours ago | parent

the participants wore headphones blasting music, explicitly to avoid the counting horse effect

fennecfoxy 12 hours ago | parent

But their gaze can also create bias. If you go to a window and look out of it, your dog will as well. If you mime looking at something your dog cannot see, it will come over and try to find what you're looking at.

SwtCyber 14 hours ago | parent

I think the cross-language comparison would be interesting, although the bouba/kiki effect seems remarkably consistent across human languages already

ofrzeta 18 hours ago | parent

celeryd 17 hours ago | parent

Stop fucking linking sciencealert.com. That is the most fucking clickbait-y science site since fucking forever. You might as well link IFLSCIENCE.

sedan_baklazhan 16 hours ago | parent

Since we are very evolutionary closely related to dogs, it makes sense to assume that our brains function in a similar way.

This is why dogs understand us so well. We are in many ways the same.

Sharlin 16 hours ago | parent

We’re not closely related to dogs as far as mammals go. Indeed we’re closer to rodents and lagomorphs, and our last common ancestor with dogs and other carnivorans likely lived before the K–Pg extinction event.

sedan_baklazhan 14 hours ago | parent

Well we're quite close with them as they're also highly intellectually developed mammals. There's a very good chance that intelligence develops in a same direction for all mammals (proof to this is how wekk we and dogs understand each other).

theultdev 12 hours ago | parent

Pretty sure dogs "understand" us because they are good pack animals. Similar to how they are paired with large cats in captivity.

Not because we are similar, just they are evolved for companionship. That and 15-17k years of forced domestication.

jacquesm 16 hours ago | parent

This is one of the central themes in the movie "The Dark Crystal".

Skeksis vs Gelflings, you guess who are the bad guys.

zkmon 16 hours ago | parent

Not sure why it should be a surprising thing. Senses work together. Not isolated. I associate numbers with taste (2 and 5 are sweeter, 3 is salty, 7 is bitter and so on), and with spatial ladder-like locations (ladder goes up from 1 to 10 and then it becomes like rope bridge until 20 and then its like a hill climb until around 40 and then it is steep down- hill upto 100.

Words are definitely associated closely with geometric shapes, and with touch and sound.

Also, most importantly, all thoughts are attached to places that you have already seen. You can't think about anything without attaching it to a known place. When you forget something, it's because that physical place (room, road, or park) is crowded with other thoughts.

tempestn 16 hours ago | parent

I believe that this is how your brain works, but it's far from universal. I've certainly never made anything like either of those number associations, nor do I associate most abstract memories with physical places (though I am familiar with the memory palace technique).

setopt 16 hours ago | parent

> I associate numbers with taste (2 and 5 are sweeter, 3 is salty, 7 is bitter and so on)

That sounds like textbook "synesthesia" to me? I don’t associate numbers with any taste, smell, or color, and would wager that this is more common than the opposite.

alex43578 15 hours ago | parent

Yeah, that's definitely an unusual association that most people wouldn't make.

rcxdude 14 hours ago | parent

And interestingly, in comparison, the mappings in synesthesia are much more arbitrary: while there are certain associations that are more common (numbers and colors, for example), there's not broad agreement on what color each number is.

lopis 14 hours ago | parent

Not everything in science needs to be surprising to be useful. Same as the meta study that confirms no link between vaccinations and autism - not surprising, but still immensely useful.

As of today we have no proof that all animals understand sounds and words the same way we do. Some closer primates likely do, because we share common ancestors that communicated similarly to us. But not dogs. We know dogs bark and can memorize words we say, but we don't know how they process those words. This is a step in that direction.

pizzafeelsright 8 hours ago | parent

Probably synesthesia. I have known a few with many questions to them to understand better.

From my discussions, the senses do work together or as I describe it is convergence of inputs creating a specific harmonic ratios or chords that map to the input.

Numbers with taste is new to me. I know for some numbers have colors or play notes/chords.

jonplackett 12 hours ago | parent

I don’t really get why this is surprising.

If you just looked at the sound wave of these being spoken you’d see one is more skirt than the other.

Even the letter b is more sounded than the letter k

nkmnz 12 hours ago | parent

I‘d like to know the shapes of kouka and bibi, please.

beeforpork 11 hours ago | parent

Well, I suppose it's pronounced [buba], right? It's not pronounced [bauba]? So why is it spelled 'bouba'? To distinguish from 'boob' (other comments here implied so)?

dhosek 10 hours ago | parent

And no one mentions the Monty Python sketch about woody and tinny words? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwXJsWHupg

maverickpilot 9 hours ago | parent

Great, my wife calls my dog "kikillo" and I call him "bubu" (:

kneel25 9 hours ago | parent

I’d be curious how it maps in a very different language to English like Arabic. I doubt we would have this immediate connection with their language, so why would a dog have it to English sounds?

saimiam 7 hours ago | parent

What explains "oboe" being the name of a slender, pipe like instrument?

ahstilde 7 hours ago | parent

The regular oboe first appeared in the mid-17th century, when it was called a hautbois, which is a compound word made up of haut ("high", "loud") and bois ("wood", "woodwind"). Thus, it was a high-pitched woodwind instrument.

Over time, hautbois (French) became oboe (English).

stygiansonic 7 hours ago | parent

Related to the Bouba/Kiki effect is the Molyneux problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molyneux%27s_problem

The experimental evidence there, though limited, suggested no innate connection between touch and sight.

PaulHoule 7 hours ago | parent

Animals definitely respond to the sounds and rhythms of human language. Like of course dogs do but my wife teaches people to ride horses and if we have a conversation that is emotionally heated the horses in the tack room horses will participate in the conversation with their own sounds, particularly when my wife is involved -- it can be very much a "call and response"

akomtu 3 hours ago | parent

What words look or sound similar to 'bouba'? What words are similar to 'kiki'?