The effect of "Buba - Kiki"

Figure from the Buba Kiki test. Most of the participants in the experiment called the left figure “kiki”, and the right - “buba”

The “buba-kiki” effect is the correspondence that the human mind establishes between the sound envelope of a word and the geometric shape of an object. An example of synesthesia of sound and form.

The effect was discovered by German-American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929 ^[1] as a result of an experiment conducted on the island of Tenerife . Köhler showed the participants two figures, rounded and acute-angled, and suggested defining which of them is called "Takete" and which is called "baluba." The experiment confirmed Kohler’s hypothesis - most people called the rounded shape “baluba”, and the acute-angled one - “takete” ^[2] .

In 2001, neurologists Vileyanur Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated Kohler’s experiment in the USA (English) and in India (Tamil), replacing the names of the figures with “kiki” and “buba”. The question was: “Which of the presented figures is“ booba ”and which is“ kiki ”?” 95% of the respondents called the “booba” a rounded figure, and the “kiki” - an acute-angled one. Thus, the hypothesis that a person assigns abstract meanings to figures and sounds in the same way was confirmed ^[3] . The work of the Canadian scientist Daphne Maurer and her colleagues showed that even 2-year-old children who cannot read, in the same way, derive the meaning of a word from its sound envelope and attribute it to a figure in accordance with its shape ^[4] .

Some felt the opposite: an acute-angled figure is a “boob”, and a curve is “kicks”. Perhaps this was due to the fact that in the word “buba” the consonant sounds are solid (and the lines in the figure are strictly straight), and in “kicks” they are soft (in the figure of the line curves, association with softness).

Ramachandran and Hubbard believe that the “buba-kiki” effect demonstrates that the names of objects in the language are by no means arbitrary ^[3] . Most will call a rounded figure a “booba,” because in order to pronounce this word, one must stretch one's lips into a tube. In order to pronounce “kicks”, it is necessary to “twist” lips. In addition, the production of sound [k] requires much more effort than sound [b]. The observed synesthesia of sound and geometric shape confirms the main thesis of phonosemantics - phonemes can carry meaning on their own.