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Kiki or bouba? In search of language's missing link


Through the looking glass, Lewis Carroll's Alice stumbles upon an enormous egg-shaped figure celebrating his un-birthday. She tries to introduce herself:


"Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully.

"Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: "My name means the shape I am - and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost."

PURE whimsy, you might think. Nearly 100 years of linguistics research has been based on the assumption that words are just collections of sounds - an agreed acoustic representation that has little to do with their actual meaning. There should be nothing in nonsense words such as "Humpty Dumpty" that would give away the character's egg-like figure, any more than someone with no knowledge of English could be expected to infer that the word "rose" represents a sweet-smelling flower.


More than 2000 years before Carroll suggested words might have some inherent meaning, Plato recorded a dialogue between two of Socrates's friends, Cratylus and Hermogenes. Hermogenes argued that language is arbitrary and the words people use are purely a matter of convention. Cratylus, like Humpty Dumpty, believed words inherently reflect their meaning - although he seems to have found his insights into language disillusioning: Aristotle says Cratylus eventually became so disenchanted that he gave up speaking entirely.

The Greek philosophers never resolved the issue, but two millennia later the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure seemed to have done so. In the 1910s, using an approach based in part on a comparison of different languages, he set out a strong case for the arbitrariness of language. Consider, for instance, the differences between "ox" and "boeuf", the English and French words for the same animal. With few similarities between these and other such terms, it seemed clear to Saussure that the sounds of words do not inherently reflect their meanings.



Using similar shapes to those in the original experiment, but changing the names of the invented terms slightly, they found that an astonishing 95 per cent of people labelled the spiky object as "kiki" and the curvy one as "bouba". One possible explanation is that this might be down to the shapes of the lips as we form the vowels in these words; in "bouba" they are more curved than in "kiki".

The work turned out to be hugely influential, helping sound symbolism to finally get off the ground as numerous studies explored the kiki/bouba phenomenon. Chris Westbury at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, for instance, has shown that consonants as well as vowels may elicit a similar association. He found that continuants, like "m" sounds, are associated with curvy shapes, while "plosives" that break up the airflow to make a more jarring sound - like a "k" - are considered spikier (Brain and Language, vol 93, p 10).


Cross-sensory connections


Others have been looking for evidence of sound symbolism in everyday speech. Although examples of onomatopoeia - words truly formed from a sound associated with what is named - are rare, it is possible that more subtle instances of sound symbolism have been lurking, almost literally, right under our noses. English words that begin with "sn" are often associated with our organ of olfaction: think "snout", "sniff", "snot", "snore" and "snorkel". Sceptics had argued that these "phonaesthemes" are pure coincidence, but research by Benjamin Bergen at the University of California, San Diego, suggests otherwise. He found that the brain processes meanings of pairs of phonaesthemes such as "snore" and "sniff" more quickly than other pairs related simply by their meaning (such as "cord" and "rope") or their sounds (such as "druid" and "drip"). That is exactly what you would expect if olfaction and the "sn" sound are somehow linked in the brain, says Bergen.

That's not all. At a recent workshop on sound symbolism in Atlanta, Georgia, he reported that "wh" words associated with words that describe the production of noises such as "whisper", "whine" or "whirr", and those beginning with "fl" that tend to signal movement in the air, such as "fly" or "flail", also enjoyed this fast track in the brain's processing. Bergen concludes that these may all be forms of sound symbolism.

Indeed, it now looks as if sound symbolism may be present in many languages. Japanese, for example, contains a large grammatical group called "mimetic" words, which by definition are particularly evocative of sensual experiences. Gorogoro roughly translates as "large object rolling", while nurunuru is meant to evoke the feel of a slimy substance. "If you ask a speaker of Japanese, they will say they evoke an image of an expression," says Sotaro Kita at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is convinced that this group of words contain some sort of sound symbolism, having discovered that both Japanese and English-speaking children learn made-up mimetic verbs more quickly when they follow the sound-meaning associations found in Japanese than when they contravene them (Cognitive Science, vol 35, p 575).

Suspecting that sound symbolism might also help adults to understand a foreign tongue, Lynne Nygaard at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, recently presented English speakers with pairs of antonyms (such as fast/slow) recorded in 10 different languages - including Albanian, Dutch, Gujarati, Mandarin and Yoruba. When given the corresponding pair of English words, and asked to match the foreign words to them, subjects performed better than they would by chance - suggesting the words' sounds must give clues to their meaning.

What could these clues be? A subsequent analysis hinted at some answers. Words that indicate general movement tend to have more vowels, for instance, and they are more likely to have glottal consonants (the "h" in "behind", for example). Sounds might also reflect the speed of movement: slow movement tends to be represented by sonorant sounds such as "l" or "w", whereas explosive obstruents produced from a blocked airway, such as "ch" or "f", are suggestive of more rapid speeds. Nygaard presented her work at the Atlanta workshop.

Bringing all the evidence together, there seems to be a strong case for saying that sound symbolism does occur in human language. However, some big questions remain. How common are words that elicit cross-sensory connections in modern languages? "Maybe they represent just small pockets of vocabulary," says Morten Christiansen at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.

Then there's the question of why we link certain sounds to certain shapes, flavours and styles of movement. The inherently nasal quality of the "sn" sound might explain why we sneeze and snore, but most attempts to explain many other examples are just stabs in the dark. Investigations into the cross-sensory connections of full-blown synaesthesia may well shed light on this.


Nevertheless, these questions have not stopped researchers exploring the potential implications of their findings. As Kita's and Nygaard's work suggests, sound symbolism could at the very least explain why some words stick in our mind better than others - a fact confirmed in a string of studies by Susan Parault, then at the University of Maryland in College Park, which showed that children across a range of ages are better able to learn unfamiliar words if they are sound-symbolic.


Most intriguingly, sound symbolism might shed light on the origins of language. It appears to revive a popular 18th-century idea called the "bow-wow" theory, which proposes that humankind's first words were onomatopoeic, mimicking sounds in our ancestors' environment. The idea seems plausible until you try to explain how humans ever came to describe silent concepts - the appearance of a cave, for example. This is why it fell out of favour following Saussure's persuasive work. But later theories fail to explain how an initially dumb primate could have evolved a complex, arbitrary system of communication with no obvious stepping stones in between.

While there's good reason to believe that humans first developed the neural toolkit for language through hand gestures, for example, how did we make the transition from gesture to the spoken word? Ramachandran and Hubbard propose that sound symbolism provided the stepping stone. If the angular sounds of "kiki" seem to fit a distinctively jagged rock, for example, the word might have emerged as obvious shorthand. Sound symbolism "helped to get the first words off the ground", says Hubbard.

Bow-wow words

Not everyone is convinced. Christiansen, for instance, accepts this revised bow-wow theory is plausible. "But we can't prove it either way," he says. Others are more positive. It's very speculative, but it is a possibility, Vigliocco says. "Manual gestures seem like an obvious way [to imitate], but vocal imitation is possible as well, from imitating the shape of an object with the shape of the mouth, to imitating the size of an object by adjusting the length of the vocal tract."


The implication, according to Kita, is that the sound-symbolic relations we see in today's languages may be remnants of those very first words - a kind of Rosetta stone that helps bridge the gulf to our earliest languages. That is a profound claim, since most attempts to chronicle ancient languages fail at just a few thousand years BC. These cross-sensory connections, on the other hand, give us a glimpse of tens of thousands of years ago, at humanity's dawn. "They are fossils from our ancestors' language," Kita says.

It is intriguing to think that if faced with the first humans ever to use language, we might have at least some common ground to share our thoughts. Now there's an adventure worthy of Lewis Carroll's Alice.

Update: 18 July 2011 at 13:33. The paragraph beginning "Chris Westbury at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada..." originally said that a "b" sound was a continuant.

Test yourself: Which sounds bigger?


1. Big or small?

The following words mean either "big" or "small". Which two words mean "big"? Click on each word to hear it spoken.





Answers: ghanda is Gujarati for "big", ufak is Turkish for "small". Scurt is Romanian for "small" and bòòkù is Yoruba for "small". When this quiz was first posted, we incorrectly stated that scurt means "big". Apologies

2. Slow or fast?

The following words mean either "slow" or "fast". Which two words mean "fast"? Click on each word to hear it spoken.





Answers: dheere is Gujurati for "slow", domol is Romanian for "slow". Grabit is Romanian for "fast" and acele is Turkish for "fast".

3. Pointy/round

The following words mean either "pointy" or "round". Which two words mean "pointy"? Click on each word to hear it spoken.





Answers: Bergerigi is Indonesian for "pointy", and dhëmbëzuar is Albanian for pointy. Yuán is Mandarin for "round" and bombat is Romanian for "round".

4. Moving/still

The following words mean either "moving" or "still". Which two words mean "still"? Click on each word to hear it spoken.





Answers: Berjalan is Indonesian for "moving", nirka is Tamil for "still". Nötr is Turkish for "still" and hareketli is Turkish for "moving".

David Robson is a biology features editor at New Scientist

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Meaningful sounds (Image: Frederic Cirou/Plainpicture)

Meaningful sounds (Image: Frederic Cirou/Plainpicture)


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