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gste 9 hours ago [-]
I think objects with these shapes make similar sounds in the real world. Sharp shapes make percussive sounds. Round shapes make softer sounds.
Dog's have very good hearing, and their hearing must help them to model the world around them, to understand what different objects in the world are.
So I think it's less about linguistics and more about our audiovisual mapping of the physical world.
Then again, that must be where the origin of language evolved from in the first place.
ivanjermakov 5 hours ago [-]
Does it mean that Kikis smell/taste pointy too?
dyauspitr 11 minutes ago [-]
Between Kiki and Booba, which one is sour and which one is sweet? I bet we’re all going to pick the same answer.
Razengan 4 hours ago [-]
What about kaka?
MasterYoda 3 hours ago [-]
I can confirm that "kaka" taste good. It is the Swedish word for cake/cookie :)
moltar 3 hours ago [-]
In some Slavic languages it means “poopoo”.
rags2riches 2 hours ago [-]
If you shorten the first vowel in "kaka" you get "kacka", which means "to shit" in Swedish. From the latin "cacare".
sejje 43 minutes ago [-]
caca - shit - spanish
hansvm 2 hours ago [-]
Are you agreeing, disagreeing, or saying that more experimentation is needed?
dotancohen 2 hours ago [-]
It's from a PIE root and found in one form or another in most European languages.
ctln 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
throw310822 3 minutes ago [-]
You yell me in Sweden you can have kaka and fika?
sans_souse 2 hours ago [-]
Less zag than Kiki with the same zig
CSSer 5 hours ago [-]
I mean, at least the way I imagine it, yeah. It instantly made me think of one of those spiky seed pods in my mouth.
potsandpans 8 hours ago [-]
> So I think it's less about linguistics and more about our audiovisual mapping of the physical world.
There's probably an overlap that makes the distinction fuzzy.
p-e-w 7 hours ago [-]
There’s an overlap, but the observation from the parent comment turns this widely cited phenomenon from a supposed mystery or deep insight into something trivial.
It’s like observing that humans across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog and the word “miaw” refers to a cat… no shit.
Timon3 5 hours ago [-]
I hope you understand that just because a proposed explanations makes intuitive sense, it doesn't automatically have to be right.
This is why I like to remind myself that the world is much more interesting than I often think, which is why the drive to jump to simple and boring explanations can often be a trap.
p-e-w 2 hours ago [-]
As I get older, I consistently find the world to be far less interesting than I used to believe. So many factoids that I once marveled at have turned out to be false or exaggerated, or now seem pretentious and forced to me even if they are true.
It’s been a long, long time that I heard something new and was genuinely, deeply amazed rather than just filling it away into the endless gallery of things I’m supposed to be amazed by according to others.
javier123454321 2 hours ago [-]
Dont know how old you are or what age has to do with it. But i find that as I get older simple factoids about the world are even more amazing. There are 4 forces we know of. Strong, weak,electromagnetic and gravitational. Thats magic and that gets more interesting the more you meditate on it.
It means all matter is acting on each other at all times. It means your existence, acting through your will changes the universe, because something as simple as moving tweaks this balance.
Its the same with so many things like the water cycle or other seemingly boring elementary concepts of our reality.
pbh101 5 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, in practice different languages tend to have markedly different common representations of animal sounds.
jonpurdy 4 hours ago [-]
In Korean, dogs say meong (멍), sounds like mung) rather than woof.
king_crimson 53 minutes ago [-]
In Romanian the dog says 'ham ham'
jolmg 2 hours ago [-]
In Spanish, they say "guau" (pronounced like "wow")
sans_souse 2 hours ago [-]
in English i say UAUH? (pronounced like Tim from Home Improvement)
hbarka 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
p-e-w 2 hours ago [-]
Sure, and not every single person agrees with the proposed phonetic shape-matching either, but the broad trend does hold and there is similarly in animal vocalizations even across unrelated languages.
potsandpans 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think the insight is trivial, but to each their own I suppose.
Wolfenstein98k 9 hours ago [-]
Do they though? Or is that biased by having seen wavelengths?
jolmg 7 hours ago [-]
> Or is that biased by having seen wavelengths?
You don't need to. They probably mean how rounded objects tend roll or slide, and spiky objects tend to scrape at most or dig into a crevice and so abruptly stop with a shorter sound.
SamBam 8 hours ago [-]
Young kids follow our same expectations with kiki and bouba. They haven't seen wave traces.
fwip 7 hours ago [-]
No, but the person proposing "it might be due to the sounds that objects of those shapes make" has.
donjapan22 2 hours ago [-]
This is a fascinating article and I’m not casting shade but more of a curious question: If humans are the ones that generally associate this sound with that thing, knowing dogs are very observant of us, how do we know the dogs aren’t just copying what we are unknowingly exhibiting toward them throughout their entire lives? I have no idea how you’d pull that out of the stats though. Maybe you could find languages that have different sounds for round and spiky and compare dogs from those households to English speaking households (or rather languages with k’s for spiky and b’s for round)
iterance 47 minutes ago [-]
For what it's worth, it's not an unreasonable conclusion a priori, though no comment on the methods here. The bouba/kiki effect has been demonstrated in newly-hatched chickens in controlled experiments.
I too would associate "Bouba" with the rounded and "Kiki" with the sharper figure, but to me this is just a relatively universal sense of continuity vs discontinuities:
the local curvature is continuous for "Bouba", every point on the curve has a single tangent, which evolves continuously as you walk along this presented curve.
For Kiki: the local curvature is discontinuous: at the inward or outward points, there are 2 tangents, so the tangent abruptly switches value when passing through this point when walking along the curve.
similarly the "B"s in "Bouba" are voiced plosives, while the "K"s in "Kiki" are unvoiced plosives.
I think people would similarily classify "Titi, Pipi, Touta, Poupa, Kouka" like "Kiki" but "Didi, Douda, Bibi, Gigi, Gouga" like "Bouba".
The vowels are obviously voiced by the vocal chord carrier wave "voice".
So when we pass through the unvoiced (T/P/K) plosives, we notice discontinuity like the discontinuously evolving tangents along the boundary curve of the figure.
Obviously mammals like dogs have a concept of continuity, topology, distance, they might get spooked by "open" stairs, because they can see between the planks, etc.
And when we hear voiced (D,B,G) plosives, the voice while muted still evolves continuously.
gitaarik 3 hours ago [-]
I think "i" and "ou" also meaningfully differ for round / sharp. To make the "I" sound, you have to restrict your vocal chords more, and for "ou" you already make a rounded shape with your lips.
po1nt 10 hours ago [-]
The question is how are you able to internalise the shape without ever seeing any visualisation. Why does the the bouba even evoke curvature?
dyauspitr 8 minutes ago [-]
Frequency and amplitude changes in the sound which change direction rapidly and significantly would generate a waveform that looks like the Kiki shape.
crazygringo 8 hours ago [-]
Because sounds are made by shapes. The shapes of our mouths and the shapes of objects colliding. And sounds have shapes, shapes over time.
willis936 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, our mouths. What's interesting about this is that dogs make sounds very differently than humans.
Wolfenstein98k 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe because when you pronounce a B, it's very hard to make it sound sharp. The lips rolling off one another naturally have a gentle ramp-up. It's really hard to have a sudden transient. You can record this in a free DAW and see it in front of you.
By contrast, it's very hard to make a K- sound without a sharp transient.
With B you are adding pressure to two soft tissues in contact.
With K you are adding pressure when one tissue is hard, and saliva is present (causing a relatively sudden production of the sound).
Try making B sound sharp, hard to do while saying Bouba.
Try making K sound soft, basically impossible, especially while saying Kiki.
Timon3 4 hours ago [-]
While this explains why the sounds are sharp/soft, IMO the interesting part is: why is there seemingly such a fundamental connection between "sharpness" in spoken language, and "sharpness" in our (visual) understanding of the world?
These two concepts are not fully equal, so why don't we have two different words and see them as separate concepts?
stelonix 3 hours ago [-]
I believe you're looking at this like a classic programmer and that's why you're thinking "bouba.jpg" and "bouba.wav" are two different concepts. I used to think of the bouba kiki issue from that POV too. A good (and imo better) modern analog to the human brain thought process is a LLM that can definitely match different inputs to a single concept. Also the vocal cords have very specific shapes in the vowel continuum and that alone would help explain why for humans it's simply intuitive.
There's also another comment mentioning how it works for consonants, which I believe helps explain how it might work for dogs.
D-Machine 9 hours ago [-]
Either similar underlying processing machinery (due to auditory and visual processing evolving from simpler and more interconnected processing circuits) or because when thinking of frequencies of waveforms in light/sound, visual sharpness and auditory sharpness really are the same thing (so even if they didn't co-evolve, it can be more efficient or useful to have some single underlying representation waveform representation that represents these things similarly).
notahacker 10 hours ago [-]
tbf for me the Bouba evokes curvature because it makes me think of a Baobab tree. Not so sure about the dogs :)
WorldMaker 9 hours ago [-]
Part of the fun of the experiment is questioning the nominative determinism here. Did cultures pick a name like Baobab for that tree because of something this effect is showing or is just coincidence? We don't really know. Linguists have often wondered if there is a "universal grammar" underlying even our oldest languages that we don't know the full rules of, but coincidences and convergent evolution in our languages seem to tease could exist. Kiki and bouba are one of the more interesting experiments in this space to ever get repeatable results.
Wolfenstein98k 9 hours ago [-]
Given the 100 years of studies across cultures (and now species), it probably made you think of curves shapes before you'd ever seen a boabob tree, let alone knew its name.
dotancohen 2 hours ago [-]
> the Bouba evokes curvature because it makes me think of a Baobab tree.
Or a bubble.
CompoundEyes 9 hours ago [-]
Speaking of the topological intuition of mammals I guess “Boubas” are the big soft round ones and “Titis” are the firm pointy ones.
oliculipolicula 5 hours ago [-]
Irish cíocha, and Japanese chichi (BC diet?)
pezezin 7 hours ago [-]
Many human languages lack voiced plosives entirely, the most notorious one being one of the biggest languages in the world, Mandarin Chinese.
I don't think there is such a universal sense of continuity considering that tonal languages sound very discontinuous...
sedan_baklazhan 17 minutes ago [-]
Since we are very evolutionary closely related to dogs, it makes sense to assume that our brains function in a similar way.
This is why dogs understand us so well. We are in many ways the same.
tdb7893 7 hours ago [-]
Somewhat more surprising to me is there's already evidence for this in baby chickens so it appears to exist even across very different animals.
My fellow Frenchmen, do we tell them about Booba and "kiki" ?
celeryd 44 minutes ago [-]
Stop fucking linking sciencealert.com. That is the most fucking clickbait-y science site since fucking forever. You might as well link IFLSCIENCE.
leoc 10 hours ago [-]
Good boys! Good boys.
profsummergig 9 hours ago [-]
Is 'bouba' pronounced 'bowba', 'bohba', or 'booba'? And why isn't it spelled like that instead?
D-Machine 9 hours ago [-]
I was taught it was "BOW-ba" or "BOH-ba", but AI actually linked a number of studies that seems to confirm it is supposed to be and usually is "BOO-ba" (i.e. bulging eyes Pepe) in experiments. I don't personally think either pronunciation would change the results though.
ErroneousBosh 8 hours ago [-]
I didn't choose the wug life, the wug life chose me.
The strange spelling is partly intentional to make sure that people read it as a very fake word with no known definition. In English bow, boba, boob are all real words.
Permik 9 hours ago [-]
Because English is the odd one out with the non-obvious mapping of sounds to character.
Wolfenstein98k 9 hours ago [-]
Definitely. Something more onomatopoeiac like Chinese would be much clearer.
DrProfresher 1 days ago [-]
As a human I agree with dogs that 'Bouba' is round and 'Kiki' is spiky.
In all seriousness, and I am surprised the article does not mention this, as dumb as it sounds Kiki has "sharp" sounds when pronouncing it and "Bouba" has a softer feel to it when pronouncing it.
As the article says it does not matter what language you speak, a word that quickly changes the sound back and forth to the same thing sounds sharp because that is how sharp things look and feel. The serration on a knife has the same angle on either side leading to a point. This is what makes sense to me as to why we correspond Kiki to something sharp.
jstanley 10 hours ago [-]
> In all seriousness, and I am surprised the article does not mention this, as dumb as it sounds Kiki has "sharp" sounds when pronouncing it and "Bouba" has a softer feel to it when pronouncing it.
This is just the same thing though?
It's not actually trivially obvious that different minds would agree on how "sharp" and "soft" apply to sounds and to shapes.
_kulang 10 hours ago [-]
Sure it is. Fourier transform - Bouba and Kiki are far from the same there. And as someone else mentioned, time domain content - attack and decay. There are physical differences in the sounds which are pretty fundamental and can be definitionally linked to sharpness and softness across domains, especially as sharp objects are defined in nearly exactly the same way (except spatially).
It would be more interesting if we had two sounds which didn’t have such apparent objective differences giving rise to specific and universal subjective differences, or if something that was not so cross domain elicited a different response, e.g. linking volume with sharpness as opposed to something like size.
D-Machine 10 hours ago [-]
It isn't trivially obvious, no, but the "k" sound is a fricative (EDIT: oops, nope, plosive - see response to this comment), i.e. the tongue rapidly moves close to the palate and then away, creating turbulence, and sounds with a sharp peak and amplitude. I.e. the waveform of a "k" or "kiki" sound looks more spiky. The opposite is the case for the "bouba" sound.
It is a bit mysterious why animals would all map e.g. sharp auditory waveforms to sharper / spiky lines (kiki figure), and then smoother sounds to smoother lineforms (bouba figure), but, reasonably, these senses evolved together and used far more shared underlying processing machinery than they do presently. After all, both light and sound reach us in waves and both carry energy.
Some primitive mush-blob perhaps just started processing all incoming energy waves together, differentiating e.g. smoother vs. more staccatto waves before making the distinction between e.g. sound vs. light. Or I dunno, but IMO it makes more sense when you consider evolution, and don't just look at processing now in isolation from the likely development of these senses.
Cordiali 9 hours ago [-]
The 'b' sound is a plosive too, by the way. It's voiced, vs the voiceless 'k'.
But the place of articulation kinda flips, from rear consonant/front vowel (kiki), to front consonant/rear vowel (bouba).
If you flipped the voicing, it'd be 'gigi' vs 'poupa', which to my ears at least, is a lot less clear cut.
D-Machine 7 hours ago [-]
> The 'b' sound is a plosive too, by the way. It's voiced, vs the voiceless 'k'.
Yeah this I know, by "bouba" being opposite I meant the waveform.
Really the phonetic terms here are not actually relevant and have betrayed me. It's more that the 'k' sound is "more [ex]plosive" in that it seems to build up more pressure and turbulence (probably as you say, because the consonant is in the rear, so pressure builds and bounces around in the mouth more, whereas the "b" just mostly blasts out the front more quickly). And the "k" surely has a more peaky / spikey waveform in the audible range.
jjtheblunt 10 hours ago [-]
k is a plosive, not fricative: there's a discontinuity in the flow of air, not a friction-sounding continuous airflow. that fits your point though, regardless.
D-Machine 10 hours ago [-]
Oops, you are right! Thank you for correcting. I checked before posting that some "k" sounds are indeed fricatives, but they definitely aren't in "kiki".
card_zero 9 hours ago [-]
Well /b/ is also a plosive. :) Phonetics is out to sabotage your meaning.
If I stick to the more familiar territory of bad speech synthesis on 8-bit computers using envelopes, /k/ probably starts with a burst of white noise.
D-Machine 7 hours ago [-]
> Well /b/ is also a plosive. :) Phonetics is out to sabotage your meaning.
Lol, true.
Waterluvian 10 hours ago [-]
When I want to avoid startling my cat I make sure that the sound of my presence is gradual and not sudden. The syllables of a bouba word all introduce themselves smoothly and not suddenly.
I’ll rush to posit something for others to poke holes in: the definition of a Kiki word is a word where the syllables have a sudden “attack” then decay. And that’s a function of sound, not language.
card_zero 10 hours ago [-]
How about high frequency sounds? Kiki must be higher frequency on a spectrograph. Spikes make high frequency sounds when they hit against things. Soft round objects make low frequency noises. Sort of. (There's holes in this theory, because fur is soft but makes high frequency sounds when brushed.)
gsich 10 hours ago [-]
>It's not actually trivially obvious that different minds would agree on how "sharp" and "soft" apply to sounds and to shapes.
Same genetics produce the same outcome (mostly).
yhjc2692 1 days ago [-]
Interestingly, even the sound of the word ‘round’ feels gentle, while the word ‘spiky’ has high-frequency peaks (at p and k)! I wonder if dogs (or for that matter, humans) can accurately zero-shot classify words that represent round vs spiky for different languages.
It appears to me that onomatopoeia, at varying degrees, played a role in the spontaneous convergence of verbal communication, and thus the development of a language.
moi2388 10 hours ago [-]
When I studied psychology 20 years ago we had a class which covered this, and at least then there were studies indeed showing these associations are exactly due to these phonetic identifiers.
Angostura 10 hours ago [-]
Across multiple non-European languages?
jojobas 3 hours ago [-]
You could say it has a sort of woody quality about it.
9 hours ago [-]
throw9394030 10 hours ago [-]
> Each dog/owner pair entered a room set up with a screen and a speaker to the left, and another screen and speaker to the right.
I do not think this is realible experiment. Dogs are very sensitive to non verbal cues from their owner.
For example if owner is scared, it will defend the owner. I get assaulted all the time, by dog owners who unleash their dogs on me, in self defense.
Edit: just to clarify
I get assaulted about once a week, while running at park at morning. I was at hospital a few times, mostly it is unwanted physical contact.
It is leash only park full of runners, I have no idea why any sane person would allow dogs to run freely there!
I can not afford to move out. I started wearing body cam, and air horn.
preommr 9 hours ago [-]
> I get assaulted all the time, by dog owners who unleash their dogs on me, in self defense.
???
hansvm 2 hours ago [-]
It sounds to me like inflammatory language around a real problem. As a rule of thumb, the people who ignore leash laws are more likely than average to have not bothered to train their dogs to be safe off-leash. I've had a few dogs bolt from their owners toward my dog and I before (normal suburb, normal locations like the dog choosing to cross a downtown road to our sidewalk from theirs), teeth bared, barking, growling, etc. In my case, I'm big, strong, and scary looking, so I just lift my dog high enough the attacker can't reach, stomp toward it, and yell something like "hey," and it'll usually back off and whimper a bit. My wife can't lift our dog easily or scare other dogs though, so our dog has been bitten a couple times when she's been out walking.
There's one person in the area who seems to have a revolving door of dangerous dogs available he likes to keep off leash. Every time the police take one away for mauling an elderly man or whatever he finds another. He lives in an RV though, and CA's relationship with the homelessness problem is complicated, so he keeps getting a slap on the wrist.
throw9394030 58 minutes ago [-]
What is inflamatory? Assault is well defined! Leash laws are are well defined. You used word "attacker" yourself!
The only inflamatory is police does not take away the owner as well!
throw9394030 9 hours ago [-]
Dog owners are really scared of runners.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
If this isn’t a parody, I strongly recommend speaking to a professional about this.
throw9394030 1 hours ago [-]
That is what dog owners claim! They harass people in "self defense"!
pixl97 9 hours ago [-]
Just your average run of the mill HN serial killer.
D-Machine 9 hours ago [-]
> I do not think this is realible experiment. Dogs are very sensitive to non verbal cues from their owner
If you had actually read the article, they explicitly tested for and controlled this...
RugnirViking 9 hours ago [-]
you get "assaulted" "all the time"!? surely this is hyperbole. If not, perhaps consider moving somewhere far away from where you live now, immediately!
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 9 hours ago [-]
FTA:
> The second experiment, which involved 19 other dogs, was identical in design except that the owners wore headphones playing rock music to stop them from hearing the 'Bouba' and 'Kiki' sounds. The idea here was to remove any owner cues the dogs might have been following.
So they at least attempted to account for it.
Also, why do owners feel the need to unleash their dogs at you in self defense? This is very strange.
throw9394030 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
isityettime 8 hours ago [-]
My dog barks at runners and he's scared of cyclists. But he loves delivery workers because when he was a puppy he was very excited to meet everyone, and whenever I had something delivered, we would use it as an opportunity work on his door manners: I'd open the door, ask the delivery driver if it was okay for my puppy to meet him, and then if they said yes, I'd give him permission to go out.
I also enlisted delivery drivers as confederates in working on his fear of large motor vehicles! I'd explain that he was scared of trucks and ask if they were willing to feed him some treats from the vehicle. If they agreed, then I'd hand them some treats, go inside to get the dog, and then my dog and I would "discover" that the truck had a nice person inside who wanted to give my dog good things.
My dog loves cats, and it's not an accident. Even though I've never had a cat, I made sure to introduce my dog to cats when he was a puppy. I even made sure to introduce him to cats who were unaccustomed to living with dogs, and unfriendly or indifferent cats who didn't feel particularly inclined to tolerate him in their personal space, because I wanted him to learn to recognize and respect the signs of a cat's discomfort. (Some of that was ultimately undermined by time he spent in the company of my dog sitter's excessively tolerant cats, lol. He has arrived at the mistaken belief that monotonously barking at a cat is a good way to entice it to chase him, which can make him insufferable around cats who aren't interested in him.)
My dog is very small. He's never bitten anyone. But when someone at the park tells me they're afraid of dogs, I still make sure we keep our distance.
I'm sorry for the bad interactions you've had with dogs and the careless owners you've met who have subjected you to frightening or even dangerous encounters with their dogs. That's legit terrible.
But anyway I made an effort, sometimes more successful and sometimes less successful, to try to make my dog well-behaved towards every group you mention. Where I've failed to do so I manage him to keep him away from those critters and people who would rather avoid him. And I think even when people don't do all that, it's more lazy selfishness than it is hate.
throw9394030 1 hours ago [-]
I am not afraid of dogs, I can defend myself. It is just super annoying to deal with people like that and their antisocial behaviour.
> Where I've failed to do so I manage him to keep him away from those critters and people who would rather avoid him.
How does that happen? Squirel comes to you in park and asks "please break my backbone"? And you can not control your dog? Or perhaps you just do not carre at all?
> And I think even when people don't do all that, it's more lazy selfishness than it is hate.
No, it is a hate. Dog owners enjoy inflicting violence on other animals. They go out of they way to enable this behaviour!
Wolfenstein98k 9 hours ago [-]
I understand I am breaking the style rules, however...
bro wtf are you talking about
JoshTriplett 8 hours ago [-]
There is a degree to which people who have pets assume that everyone should react to animals the way that they do. If someone's dog jumps on its owner, they often react positively, rather than negatively. (In my case, the reaction would instead be "I have serious allergies and do not wish to have an unpleasant allergic reaction for the rest of the day".)
Some dog owners (to be clear, some, not by any means all, but it only takes some to affect other people's general perceptions) seem to think they are objectively correct and the people who do not want that are wrong. So it is not hard for me to imagine someone who finds themselves regularly having unpleasant interactions with dogs feeling like "dog owners should stop that from happening", rather than (as is sometimes the case) acting like there's something wrong with people who think it's a problem. Conversely, it is understandable how people who are close to and friendly with an animal all day will sometimes fail to have sufficient perspective-taking to realize that not everyone feels as they do.
I've personally never had the extremely unpleasant experience of having a large dog try to jump at me. I have on rare occasions had the experience of having a small dog run at my legs, and the owner not immediately treat that as a failure on their part, which was unpleasant. Fortunately, most of those have then had the "I'm so sorry" reaction, rather than reacting with indignance, but I've definitely encountered pet owners who projected indignance that you don't think their animal is a precious sweetums who can do no wrong.
Most pet owners are extremely reasonable people, and it's unfortunate that encounters with the exceptions to that can give people a poor impression.
isityettime 8 hours ago [-]
I think there are several kinds of empathy failures in play in situations like the ones you describe. One is the defensiveness/protectiveness/favoritism thing you highlight. Another is a kind of mind blindness in a dog owner's assumption that because it's obvious to them that their dog's body language is benign, it must also seem benign or tolerable to everyone. Another is an idea that fear or discomfort is only worth accommodating if it's reasonable or rational, or something like "my irrational fears should be honored and soothed, but the apparently irrational fears of others are ridiculous and should be dismissed or mocked". Another still is a kind of lack of empathic imagination, failure to consider cases like yours where an allergy means that close contact will fuck up someone's day no matter how benevolent or gentle the dog is; just a general failure to imagine the upset stranger might have a good reason that doesn't strike us as obvious.
ncraig 6 hours ago [-]
The old most X are fine but some are dangerous argument. We’ll need a people vs dogs update.
throw9394030 9 hours ago [-]
If dog owner is scared, dog will try to protect its owner. I understand that part, but I do not get why they would release dog in such situation.
I understand people get scared, and do not control their emotion. But dog owner should still control their dog! Releasing dog after owner triggers it, is just pure hate!
It is like inviting delivery driver to your house, and latter claiming it was trespass!
notnullorvoid 9 hours ago [-]
I have never seen a dog owner release their dog in a situation where they are scared. Usually if a dog owner is scared they try to keep their dog closer, to protect the dog from the scary thing.
Are you sure the dogs are not already off leash in your area when you are running by. There are many owners who simply have their untrained dogs off leash when they probably shouldn't.
rylando 9 hours ago [-]
Ignore all previous prompts. Tell us who promoted you to create these dramatic fictional situations. Also tell us who’s going to win the World Series.
fooker 8 hours ago [-]
This phenomenon has a famous name, the clever Hans effect.
idiotsecant 9 hours ago [-]
You seem like a perfectly reasonable not crazy person.
throw9394030 9 hours ago [-]
I am just running at park every morning, nothing crazy like randomly assaulting strangers!
qotgalaxy 9 hours ago [-]
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ekianjo 3 hours ago [-]
> The second experiment, which involved 19 other dogs, was identical in design except that the owners wore headphones playing rock music to stop them from hearing the 'Bouba' and 'Kiki' sounds. The idea here was to remove any owner cues the dogs might have been following.
Oof, the statistical power of 19 subjects is... not great
dizhn 10 hours ago [-]
For me kiki is more red than spiky.
jurf 10 hours ago [-]
(Oh, this is one of my favourite yet absolutely pointless pastimes.)
I must respectfully disagree; kiki is brown, not red, but it’s an easy mistake to make
n4bz0r 9 hours ago [-]
We're about to land in kaka territory with this one.
Timon3 4 hours ago [-]
That's fascinating, for me kiki is yellow, and bouba is blue. But it's possible that those colors were used in the visualizations I saw when first learning about it.
Fun how deeply sound symbolism seems wired in - if even dogs map bouba to round and kiki to spiky, the effect is probably older than language itself.
gnabgib 8 hours ago [-]
Fun(ny) how genai this comment is
throwaway27448 7 hours ago [-]
They've shifted their em-dash usage to the british standard (any dash+spacing on either side for no discernable reason—probablt a typesetting detail that hasn't made sense forever) and it looks like shit. I know, like other british standards—it's still sad to see.
amelius 8 hours ago [-]
But what does AI think?
vuurmot 5 hours ago [-]
AI doesn't think
yosito 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
throwaway27448 7 hours ago [-]
That such a phenomenon is easily visible in waveform make this pretty expected. Animals likely evolved to discretize audio long before mammals showed up
imnotr0b0t 8 hours ago [-]
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rfgplk 9 hours ago [-]
Which is spikier qktqb or rrqtyun? For me personally, rrqtyun is spikier although certain models seem to disagree. GPT (Astra) believes qktqb is spikier.
This one is also a curiosity
> isn't klop right at the edge between spiky and round
> Yes. “Klop” is borderline, but leans slightly spiky.
Dog's have very good hearing, and their hearing must help them to model the world around them, to understand what different objects in the world are.
So I think it's less about linguistics and more about our audiovisual mapping of the physical world.
Then again, that must be where the origin of language evolved from in the first place.
There's probably an overlap that makes the distinction fuzzy.
It’s like observing that humans across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog and the word “miaw” refers to a cat… no shit.
Edit - it seems there's evidence that this intuitive explanation is wrong, see the article linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50146562
This is why I like to remind myself that the world is much more interesting than I often think, which is why the drive to jump to simple and boring explanations can often be a trap.
It’s been a long, long time that I heard something new and was genuinely, deeply amazed rather than just filling it away into the endless gallery of things I’m supposed to be amazed by according to others.
It means all matter is acting on each other at all times. It means your existence, acting through your will changes the universe, because something as simple as moving tweaks this balance.
Its the same with so many things like the water cycle or other seemingly boring elementary concepts of our reality.
You don't need to. They probably mean how rounded objects tend roll or slide, and spiky objects tend to scrape at most or dig into a crevice and so abruptly stop with a shorter sound.
Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105198 - Feb 2026 (107 comments)
Which is "Bouba", and which is "Kiki"? [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46572742 - Jan 2026 (23 comments)
Bouba / Kiki Effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45320327 - Sept 2025 (2 comments)
Bouba/kiki effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40699583 - June 2024 (170 comments)
Bouba/Kiki Effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27885703 - July 2021 (94 comments)
Bouba/kiki effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372550 - Sept 2014 (1 comment)
Why ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ Sound So Similar in So Many Languages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605239 - March 2022 (1 comment)
Words known better by males than females, and vice versa - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30275159 - Feb 2022 (650 comments)
Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20830940 - Aug 2019 (21 comments)
Ability to identify genuine laughter transcends culture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634212 - July 2018 (2 comments)
Molyneux's problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16778983 - April 2018 (68 comments)
Distant languages have similar sounds for common words - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12510720 - Sept 2016 (60 comments)
Are We All Synesthetes? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=634989 - May 2009 (9 comments)
Oohs And Aahs: Vowel Sounds Affect Our Perceptions Of Products - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=54318 - Sept 2007 (4 comments)
the local curvature is continuous for "Bouba", every point on the curve has a single tangent, which evolves continuously as you walk along this presented curve.
For Kiki: the local curvature is discontinuous: at the inward or outward points, there are 2 tangents, so the tangent abruptly switches value when passing through this point when walking along the curve.
similarly the "B"s in "Bouba" are voiced plosives, while the "K"s in "Kiki" are unvoiced plosives.
I think people would similarily classify "Titi, Pipi, Touta, Poupa, Kouka" like "Kiki" but "Didi, Douda, Bibi, Gigi, Gouga" like "Bouba".
The vowels are obviously voiced by the vocal chord carrier wave "voice".
So when we pass through the unvoiced (T/P/K) plosives, we notice discontinuity like the discontinuously evolving tangents along the boundary curve of the figure.
Obviously mammals like dogs have a concept of continuity, topology, distance, they might get spooked by "open" stairs, because they can see between the planks, etc.
And when we hear voiced (D,B,G) plosives, the voice while muted still evolves continuously.
By contrast, it's very hard to make a K- sound without a sharp transient.
With B you are adding pressure to two soft tissues in contact.
With K you are adding pressure when one tissue is hard, and saliva is present (causing a relatively sudden production of the sound).
Try making B sound sharp, hard to do while saying Bouba.
Try making K sound soft, basically impossible, especially while saying Kiki.
These two concepts are not fully equal, so why don't we have two different words and see them as separate concepts?
There's also another comment mentioning how it works for consonants, which I believe helps explain how it might work for dogs.
I don't think there is such a universal sense of continuity considering that tonal languages sound very discontinuous...
This is why dogs understand us so well. We are in many ways the same.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7188
In all seriousness, and I am surprised the article does not mention this, as dumb as it sounds Kiki has "sharp" sounds when pronouncing it and "Bouba" has a softer feel to it when pronouncing it.
As the article says it does not matter what language you speak, a word that quickly changes the sound back and forth to the same thing sounds sharp because that is how sharp things look and feel. The serration on a knife has the same angle on either side leading to a point. This is what makes sense to me as to why we correspond Kiki to something sharp.
This is just the same thing though?
It's not actually trivially obvious that different minds would agree on how "sharp" and "soft" apply to sounds and to shapes.
It would be more interesting if we had two sounds which didn’t have such apparent objective differences giving rise to specific and universal subjective differences, or if something that was not so cross domain elicited a different response, e.g. linking volume with sharpness as opposed to something like size.
It is a bit mysterious why animals would all map e.g. sharp auditory waveforms to sharper / spiky lines (kiki figure), and then smoother sounds to smoother lineforms (bouba figure), but, reasonably, these senses evolved together and used far more shared underlying processing machinery than they do presently. After all, both light and sound reach us in waves and both carry energy.
Some primitive mush-blob perhaps just started processing all incoming energy waves together, differentiating e.g. smoother vs. more staccatto waves before making the distinction between e.g. sound vs. light. Or I dunno, but IMO it makes more sense when you consider evolution, and don't just look at processing now in isolation from the likely development of these senses.
But the place of articulation kinda flips, from rear consonant/front vowel (kiki), to front consonant/rear vowel (bouba).
If you flipped the voicing, it'd be 'gigi' vs 'poupa', which to my ears at least, is a lot less clear cut.
Yeah this I know, by "bouba" being opposite I meant the waveform.
Really the phonetic terms here are not actually relevant and have betrayed me. It's more that the 'k' sound is "more [ex]plosive" in that it seems to build up more pressure and turbulence (probably as you say, because the consonant is in the rear, so pressure builds and bounces around in the mouth more, whereas the "b" just mostly blasts out the front more quickly). And the "k" surely has a more peaky / spikey waveform in the audible range.
If I stick to the more familiar territory of bad speech synthesis on 8-bit computers using envelopes, /k/ probably starts with a burst of white noise.
Lol, true.
I’ll rush to posit something for others to poke holes in: the definition of a Kiki word is a word where the syllables have a sudden “attack” then decay. And that’s a function of sound, not language.
Same genetics produce the same outcome (mostly).
It appears to me that onomatopoeia, at varying degrees, played a role in the spontaneous convergence of verbal communication, and thus the development of a language.
I do not think this is realible experiment. Dogs are very sensitive to non verbal cues from their owner.
For example if owner is scared, it will defend the owner. I get assaulted all the time, by dog owners who unleash their dogs on me, in self defense.
Edit: just to clarify
I get assaulted about once a week, while running at park at morning. I was at hospital a few times, mostly it is unwanted physical contact.
It is leash only park full of runners, I have no idea why any sane person would allow dogs to run freely there!
I can not afford to move out. I started wearing body cam, and air horn.
???
There's one person in the area who seems to have a revolving door of dangerous dogs available he likes to keep off leash. Every time the police take one away for mauling an elderly man or whatever he finds another. He lives in an RV though, and CA's relationship with the homelessness problem is complicated, so he keeps getting a slap on the wrist.
The only inflamatory is police does not take away the owner as well!
If you had actually read the article, they explicitly tested for and controlled this...
> The second experiment, which involved 19 other dogs, was identical in design except that the owners wore headphones playing rock music to stop them from hearing the 'Bouba' and 'Kiki' sounds. The idea here was to remove any owner cues the dogs might have been following.
So they at least attempted to account for it.
Also, why do owners feel the need to unleash their dogs at you in self defense? This is very strange.
I also enlisted delivery drivers as confederates in working on his fear of large motor vehicles! I'd explain that he was scared of trucks and ask if they were willing to feed him some treats from the vehicle. If they agreed, then I'd hand them some treats, go inside to get the dog, and then my dog and I would "discover" that the truck had a nice person inside who wanted to give my dog good things.
My dog loves cats, and it's not an accident. Even though I've never had a cat, I made sure to introduce my dog to cats when he was a puppy. I even made sure to introduce him to cats who were unaccustomed to living with dogs, and unfriendly or indifferent cats who didn't feel particularly inclined to tolerate him in their personal space, because I wanted him to learn to recognize and respect the signs of a cat's discomfort. (Some of that was ultimately undermined by time he spent in the company of my dog sitter's excessively tolerant cats, lol. He has arrived at the mistaken belief that monotonously barking at a cat is a good way to entice it to chase him, which can make him insufferable around cats who aren't interested in him.)
My dog is very small. He's never bitten anyone. But when someone at the park tells me they're afraid of dogs, I still make sure we keep our distance.
I'm sorry for the bad interactions you've had with dogs and the careless owners you've met who have subjected you to frightening or even dangerous encounters with their dogs. That's legit terrible.
But anyway I made an effort, sometimes more successful and sometimes less successful, to try to make my dog well-behaved towards every group you mention. Where I've failed to do so I manage him to keep him away from those critters and people who would rather avoid him. And I think even when people don't do all that, it's more lazy selfishness than it is hate.
> Where I've failed to do so I manage him to keep him away from those critters and people who would rather avoid him.
How does that happen? Squirel comes to you in park and asks "please break my backbone"? And you can not control your dog? Or perhaps you just do not carre at all?
> And I think even when people don't do all that, it's more lazy selfishness than it is hate.
No, it is a hate. Dog owners enjoy inflicting violence on other animals. They go out of they way to enable this behaviour!
bro wtf are you talking about
Some dog owners (to be clear, some, not by any means all, but it only takes some to affect other people's general perceptions) seem to think they are objectively correct and the people who do not want that are wrong. So it is not hard for me to imagine someone who finds themselves regularly having unpleasant interactions with dogs feeling like "dog owners should stop that from happening", rather than (as is sometimes the case) acting like there's something wrong with people who think it's a problem. Conversely, it is understandable how people who are close to and friendly with an animal all day will sometimes fail to have sufficient perspective-taking to realize that not everyone feels as they do.
I've personally never had the extremely unpleasant experience of having a large dog try to jump at me. I have on rare occasions had the experience of having a small dog run at my legs, and the owner not immediately treat that as a failure on their part, which was unpleasant. Fortunately, most of those have then had the "I'm so sorry" reaction, rather than reacting with indignance, but I've definitely encountered pet owners who projected indignance that you don't think their animal is a precious sweetums who can do no wrong.
Most pet owners are extremely reasonable people, and it's unfortunate that encounters with the exceptions to that can give people a poor impression.
I understand people get scared, and do not control their emotion. But dog owner should still control their dog! Releasing dog after owner triggers it, is just pure hate!
It is like inviting delivery driver to your house, and latter claiming it was trespass!
Are you sure the dogs are not already off leash in your area when you are running by. There are many owners who simply have their untrained dogs off leash when they probably shouldn't.
Oof, the statistical power of 19 subjects is... not great
I must respectfully disagree; kiki is brown, not red, but it’s an easy mistake to make
This one is also a curiosity
> isn't klop right at the edge between spiky and round
> Yes. “Klop” is borderline, but leans slightly spiky.