AI Insight
Researchers demonstrated that macaques exhibit the Bouba-Kiki effect, reliably associating rounded shapes with "bouba"-like sounds and spiky shapes with "kiki"-like sounds. This finding suggests that sound-shape correspondences are not unique to humans or language-dependent, but rather represent a conserved perceptual feature across vertebrates that predates human symbolic communication. The study used a free-choice task with nine macaques to establish this cross-modal association.
Why it matters
This discovery suggests that the building blocks for symbolic communication and language may have deeper evolutionary roots than previously thought. Understanding these fundamental perceptual biases could inform theories about how human language evolved and how abstract concepts become linked to sensory experiences across species.
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⚠️ Preprint – Noch nicht peer-reviewed
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Humans reliably associate certain speech-like sounds with visual shapes, most notably in the Bouba-Kiki Effect, where rounded and spiky shapes are matched with the sounds Bouba and Kiki, respectively. Although often linked to language and culture, evidence from preverbal infants and domestic chickens suggests that sound-shape correspondences may reflect an experience-independent perceptual bias. However, studies on great apes failed to detect such bias, leaving open the question on its phylogenetic origin. Using a free-choice task, we showed the Bouba-Kiki effect in nine macaques, thus suggesting that such correspondences represent a conserved feature of vertebrate perception that may have provided a scaffold for the later emergence of symbolic communication systems in our species.
Source: Sound-shape correspondences in macaques reveal evolutionary roots of sound symbolism