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

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).

But you're focusing on humans and the human languages, and I'm honestly curious about the "step change" hypothesis!

I think I've heard about it before, but my stint at university in linguistics is > 15 yrs ago, so I don't know much about it.

I remember recognozing Chomsky when later studying CS and formal language basics came up, bringing the Chomsky hierarchy.

Do you have some favorite links to share about the "step change" hypothesis? I remember reading some odd info-news article comparing brains among different species of homo; and and maybe also this particular hypothesis, but I'm not really informed.

That aside, I don't understand why this "onomatopoeia" couldn't be shared among different animals and humans:

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

Claiming that animals had no language at all would obviously be false. But we still have reason to think (?) that the human languages are intertwined with the intelligence gap we observe between humans and other mammals.

Suddenly doesn't mean instantly.

We have examples of people trying to invent languages in modern times, and it does not appear to be a fast process. The first people doing it would have the additional struggles of having no prior examples, no ability to take notes (writing having not yet been invented), and having to teach others to talk for the first time.

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

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

What about kaka?

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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

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

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.

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).

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

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

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

Irish cíocha, and Japanese chichi (BC diet?)

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Dog owners are really scared of runners.

Just your average run of the mill HN serial killer.

right but...

> The main difference between the two experiments was that dogs in study 1 showed a general bias toward looking at the spiky shapes. That bias disappeared in study 2, when their owners were wearing headphones.

... so, they accounted for it, and the control group (group wearing headphones) showed no significance in the dog's behavior. Seems like a huge claim when their control group to rule out the hans effect failed.

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.)

>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).

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.

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