Trial reportScientific reports2016
When "Bouba" equals "Kiki": Cultural commonalities and cultural differences in sound-shape correspondences.
Trial report in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Is Kiki angry and Bouba happy? Association between emotions, shapes, and sounds.Psychological research · 2025Article
- The influence of iconicity and autistic traits on novel word learning: a cross-cultural investigation.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Prokofiev was (almost) right: A cross-cultural investigation of auditory-conceptual associations in Peter and the Wolf.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- The Bouba-Kiki effect is predicted by sound properties but not speech properties.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Emotional responses of Korean and Chinese women to Hangul phonemes to the gender of an artificial intelligence voice.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The influence of Bouba- and Kiki-like shape on perceived taste of chocolate pieces.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Examining the automaticity and symmetry of sound-shape correspondences.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- A cross-linguistic, sound symbolic relationship between labial consonants, voiced plosives, and Pokémon friendship.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Random forests, sound symbolism and Pokémon evolution.PloS one · 2023Article
- Resolving the bouba-kiki effect enigma by rooting iconic sound symbolism in physical properties of round and spiky objects.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- A Cross-Modal and Cross-lingual Study of Iconicity in Language: Insights From Deep Learning.Cognitive science · 2022Article
- ThePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Stimulus Parameters Underlying Sound-Symbolic Mapping of Auditory Pseudowords to Visual Shapes.Cognitive science · 2020Article
- A Protracted Sensitive Period Regulates the Development of Cross-Modal Sound-Shape Associations in Humans.Psychological science · 2019Article
- I know that "Kiki" is angular: The metacognition underlying sound-shape correspondences.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2019Article
- Bouba/Kiki in Touch: Associations Between Tactile Perceptual Qualities and Japanese Phonemes.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Glyph guessing for 'oo' and 'ee': spatial frequency information in sound symbolic matching for ancient and unfamiliar scripts.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- Assessing the Role of the 'Unity Assumption' on Multisensory Integration: A Review.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Review
- Is a High Tone Pointy? Speakers of Different Languages Match Mandarin Chinese Tones to Visual Shapes Differently.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It has been suggested that the Bouba/Kiki effect, in which meaningless speech sounds are systematically mapped onto rounded or angular shapes, reflects a universal crossmodal correspondence between audition and vision. Here, radial frequency (RF) patterns were adapted in order to compare the Bouba/Kiki effect in Eastern and Western participants demonstrating different perceptual styles. Three attributes of the RF patterns were manipulated: The frequency, amplitude, and spikiness of the sinusoidal modulations along the circumference of a circle. By testing participants in the US and Taiwan, both cultural commonalities and differences in sound-shape correspondence were revealed. RF patterns were more likely to be matched with "Kiki" than with "Bouba" when the frequency, amplitude, and spikiness increased. The responses from both groups of participants had a similar weighting on frequency; nevertheless, the North Americans had a higher weighting on amplitude, but a lower weighting on spikiness, than their Taiwanese counterparts. These novel results regarding cultural differences suggest that the Bouba/Kiki effect is partly tuned by differing perceptual experience. In addition, using the RF patterns in the Bouba/Kiki effect provides a "mid-level" linkage between visual and auditory processing, and a future understanding of sound-shape correspondences based on the mechanism of visual pattern processing.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.