ArticleScientific reports2019
Sound symbolic congruency detection in humans but not in great apes.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Reversed sound-shape association in tortoises (Testudo marginata).Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Sound-action symbolism in relation to precision manipulation and whole-hand grasp usage.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2024Article
- Sound-meaning associations allow listeners to infer the meaning of foreign language words.Communications psychology · 2023Article
- Evidence for compositionality in baboons (Papio papio) through the test case of negation.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Resolving the bouba-kiki effect enigma by rooting iconic sound symbolism in physical properties of round and spiky objects.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Flexible auditory training, psychophysics, and enrichment of common marmosets with an automated, touchscreen-based system.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Bo-NO-bouba-kiki: picture-word mapping but no spontaneous sound symbolic speech-shape mapping in a language trained bonobo.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- ThePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Theories on the evolution of language highlight iconicity as one of the unique features of human language. One important manifestation of iconicity is sound symbolism, the intrinsic relationship between meaningless speech sounds and visual shapes, as exemplified by the famous correspondences between the pseudowords 'maluma' vs. 'takete' and abstract curved and angular shapes. Although sound symbolism has been studied extensively in humans including young children and infants, it has never been investigated in non-human primates lacking language. In the present study, we administered the classic "takete-maluma" paradigm in both humans (N = 24 and N = 31) and great apes (N = 8). In a forced choice matching task, humans but not great apes, showed crossmodal sound symbolic congruency effects, whereby effects were more pronounced for shape selections following round-sounding primes than following edgy-sounding primes. These results suggest that the ability to detect sound symbolic correspondences is the outcome of a phylogenetic process, whose underlying emerging mechanism may be relevant to symbolic ability more generally.
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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.