When “Bouba” equals “Kiki”: Cultural commonalities and cultural differences in sound-shape correspondences

Abstract

It has been suggested that the Bouba/Kiki effect, in which meaningless speech sounds are systematically mapped onto rounded or angular shapes, reflects a universal crossmodal correspondence between audition and vision. Here, radial frequency (RF) patterns were adapted in order to compare the Bouba/Kiki effect in Eastern and Western participants demonstrating different perceptual styles. Three attributes of the RF patterns were manipulated: The frequency, amplitude, and spikiness of the sinusoidal modulations along the circumference of a circle. By testing participants in the US and Taiwan, both cultural commonalities and differences in sound-shape correspondence were revealed. RF patterns were more likely to be matched with “Kiki” than with “Bouba” when the frequency, amplitude, and spikiness increased. The responses from both groups of participants had a similar weighting on frequency; nevertheless, the North Americans had a higher weighting on amplitude, but a lower weighting on spikiness, than their Taiwanese counterparts. These novel results regarding cultural differences suggest that the Bouba/Kiki effect is partly tuned by differing perceptual experience. In addition, using the RF patterns in the Bouba/Kiki effect provides a “mid-level” linkage between visual and auditory processing, and a future understanding of sound-shape correspondences based on the mechanism of visual pattern processing.

Acoustic and Visual Stimulus Parameters Underlying Sound Symbolic Crossmodal Correspondences

“…Sound symbolism has been demonstrated across different languages (Blasi et al, 2016), cultures (Chen et al, 2016;Kantartzis et al, 2011), and even with children of pre-reading age (Imai et al, 2015;Maurer et al, 2006;Ozturk et al, 2013;Tzeng, Nygaard, & Namy, 2017). These studies show that the existence of sound-symbolic CCs in language is both prolific and robust.…”

“…The simplicity of our shapes may explain why spatial FFT was not a significant contributor to the perceptual judgments of shape (Petrou & Petrou, 2011). Future studies should examine complex images or examine visual properties important for other types of CCs (Chen et al, 2016;Jonas, Spiller, & Hibbard, 2017).…”

“…The present study is the first to systematically examine both the acoustic and the visual drivers of sound symbolism in the sound-shape domain within the same experimental paradigm and using RSA; previous studies have only examined such parameters separately (visual: Chen et al, 2016;acoustic: Knoeferle et al, 2017). Additionally, our stimulus sets comprising 90 shapes and 537 pseudowords are more extensive than in previous studies (e.g.…”

“…'p', 't', and 'k' sounds in English) or sonorant (e.g. 'm', 'n', or 'l' sounds in English) consonants (Nielsen & Rendall, 2011;Fort, Martin, & Peperkamp, 2014) or the presence or absence of corners in a visual shape (Chen et al, 2016). In addition, individuals seem to base sound-symbolic CCs on intrinsic physical properties of shapes and speech sounds.…”

Neural Basis of the Sound-Symbolic Crossmodal Correspondence Between Auditory Pseudowords and Visual Shapes

“…Both visuospatial attributes of shapes (e.g., size, spatial frequency) and phonetic attributes of linguistic segments (e.g., sonority, formant frequencies) could be encoded by a domain-general magnitude system (Dehaene et al, 2003;Walsh, 2003;Lourenco & Longo, 2011) in which different attributes might become associated by virtue of occupying similar positions along magnitude dimensions. Some evidence for this comes from studies in which pseudowords with varying phonetic features were readily placed along continua of pointedness and roundedness or linearly matched with novel objects of varying size (Thompson & Estes, 2011), as well as the systematic relationship of sound-symbolic associations to phonetic features of sounds (Knoeferle et al, 2017;McCormick et al, 2015) and radial frequency patterns of shapes (Chen et al, 2016). In this case, activity related to sound symbolism might be expected in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), an area involved in processing both numerical and non-numerical (e.g., luminance) magnitude (Sathian et al, 1999;Eger et al, 2003;Walsh, 2003;Pinel et al, 2004;Piazza et al, 2004Piazza et al, , 2007Sokolowski et al, 2017).…”