> 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!