bouba kiki

For some time, I’ve been convinced that my blog archives are gaslighting me and usually that belief gets vilified in the end after encountering several instances with no productive records, some creative searching will finally yield the topic I could vaguely recall posting about four years and revive it with a contemporary reference—other times, though, there is a strange unresolving defeat where I still think that that had been something we blogged about before.

It seems, when a recent entry reminded me of the phenomenon and global study, that the Bouba/Kiki Effect had decamped with the latter, rather than eventually revealing itself, not that there is not also bit of self-censoring, self-promotion and obfuscation going on as well—a search void being a notoriously hard thing to find.
First observed in 1929 and then more rigourousy studied in the early 2000s, there’s a strong preference—though with notable exceptions, for people to associate the more jagged, spiky shape with the identity Kiki and the amorphous, rounder one with Bouba—also in terms of assigning roles, compliance versus determination.
Researchers suspect that the results may indicate a neural basis for sound symbolism and a correlation with early stages of perceiving, conceiving and forming a word with meaning attached, the mouth making shapes that agree in a way, suggesting consistency of cognition, with the characters. A deliberate mismatch, a spiky Bouba, generated a fairly great deal of dissonance for something with such seemingly low stakes.