From PsyPost:
Our tendency to match specific sounds with specific shapes, even abstract shapes, is so fundamental that it guides perception before we are consciously aware of it, according to new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
The “bouba-kiki” effect, originally reported over 85 years ago and replicated many times since, shows that people consistently pair the soft-sounding nonsense word “bouba” with soft-looking, round shapes and they typically pair the sharp-sounding nonsense word “kiki” with spiky-looking, angular shapes. This effect seems to emerge across cultures and age groups, indicating that it may represent a universal mapping between different modes of perception.
. . . .
The new findings from three experiments show that the bouba-kiki effect operates on a deeper, more fundamental level than previously observed:
“This is the first report that congruence between a visual word form and the visual properties of a shape can influence behavior when neither the word nor the object has been seen,” says researcher Shao-Min (Sean) Hung of Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, first author on the research.
. . . .
In this experiment, the target image was always a nonsense word, bubu or kiki, inside of a shape. Sometimes the word (bubu) was congruent with the shape it was in (round) and sometimes it was incongruent with the shape (angular). The participants pressed a key whenever the target image became visible.
Timing data showed that the target image broke through to conscious awareness faster when it was congruent than when it was incongruent, indicating that participants perceived and processed the relationship between word and shape before they were consciously aware of the stimuli.
Link to the rest at PsyPost
The headline, of course, is silly. We all realize that words ‘sound “round” or “sharp”’ (and any number of other things). We just don’t dwell on it every day.
The field of linguistics (I am sad to say from personal experience) is cluttered with this kind of humbug: Noticing something that ordinary people were always perfectly aware of about their use of language, and then claiming that it is done unconsciously and that nobody but a Trained Linguist Doing Research could possibly spot it.
Hence the glorious naming of the wombat. What could be more perfect?