bouba/kiki effect

English
This picture is used as a test to demonstrate that people may not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily: American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India called the shape on the left "kiki" and the one on the right "bouba".

Etymology

Bouba and kiki were the pseudowords used in a 2001 experiment on this topic, carried out by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard. See picture.

Noun

the bouba/kiki effect

  1. A non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects.
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