21 Jun 2026
You already know all about Kiki and Bouba, but the truth goes way deeper than you think. It turns out the Kiki-Bouba effect isn’t really about language at all, but it can tell us a lot about our brains, why languages look the way they do, and maybe even where language came from in the first place!
Chapters
0:00 – The mystery of Kiki-Bouba
3:16 – Shape and letters
5:37 – What babies know
7:05 – Baby chicks!
8:07 – The phonetics of Kiki-Bouba
9:51 – Let’s do an experiment
10:41 – The sound of round
11:26 – Deep origins
12:43 – The impact of Kiki-Bouba
Sources
Blasi et al. (2016). Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages.
Bremner et al. (2013). ‘‘Bouba’’ and ‘‘Kiki’’ in Namibia? A remote culture make similar shape–sound matches, but different shape–taste matches to Westerners.
Ćwiek et al. (2021). The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems.
Davis (1961). The fitness of names to drawings. A cross-cultural study in Tananyika.
Fort & Schwartz (2022). Resolving the bouba‑kiki effect enigma by rooting iconic sound symbolism in physical properties of round and spiky objects.
Hinton, Nichols & Ohala (1994). Sound Symbolism.
Kalan, Mundry & Boesch (2015). Wild chimpanzees modify food call structure with respect to tree size for a particular fruit species.
Köhler 1929. Gestalt Psychology.
Loconsole, Varela & Regolin (2026). Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the Bouba-Kiki effect in naïve baby chicks.
Lockwood & Dingemanse (2015). Iconicity in the lab: a review of behavioral, developmental, and neuroimaging research into sound-symbolism.
Lupyan & Casasanto (2014). Meaningless words promote meaningful categorization.
Sidhu & Pexman (2017). A prime example of the maluma/takete effect? Testing for sound symbolic priming.
Maurer, Pathman & Mondloch (2006). The shape of boubas: sound–shape correspondences in toddlers and adults.
Nielsen & Rendall (2011). The sound of round: Evaluating the sound-symbolic role of consonants in the classic takete-maluma phenomenon.
Ozturk, Krehm & Vouloumanos (2013). Sound symbolism in infancy: Evidence for sound–shape cross-modal correspondences in 4-month-olds.
Ramachandran & Hubbard (2001). Synaesthesia—A window into perception, thought and language.
Sapir (1929). A study in phonetic symbolism.
[…]
msamba 