This phenomenon of "sound symbolism" has received a lot of research attention in the last 10 years or so. For a long time it was considered a curiosity at best, and a total red herring at worst, but a lot of evidence is accumulating that sound symbolic effects are very real and may have profound implications for our understanding of sensorimotor cognition.
That seems to me like it just shifts the problem one level. Why are K's and Kikis spiky and why are B's and Boubas round. Why is it universal too across people with different writing systems and languages.
Recently came across another video that demonstrates the effect
https://www.instagram.com/p/DP7CXKACDOY/
Here is the Wikipedia article about the phenomenon of the bouba–kiki effect if you prefer text form or want to know more about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba%2Fkiki_effect
One of my favourite nerdy jokes is that the Fourier transform is a bouba-kiki transform.
I think this indicates the features from vision and audio got aligned properly and hence we know what is what intuitively.
This phenomenon of "sound symbolism" has received a lot of research attention in the last 10 years or so. For a long time it was considered a curiosity at best, and a total red herring at worst, but a lot of evidence is accumulating that sound symbolic effects are very real and may have profound implications for our understanding of sensorimotor cognition.
The shapes just look like the letters. K’s have sharp corners, B’s are round.
The effect replicates in languages with other writing systems.
That seems to me like it just shifts the problem one level. Why are K's and Kikis spiky and why are B's and Boubas round. Why is it universal too across people with different writing systems and languages.
In Telugu, k is one of the smoother letters: కి (ki: the squiggle at the top is the i vowel sign).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23121711/
Interesting. Who would have thought that the human brain could have predicted latin script aeons before it existed?