Shaking Takete and Flowing Maluma. Non-Sense Words Are Associated with Motion Patterns.

Markus Koppensteiner,Pia Stephan,Johannes Paul Michael Jäschke,Katsumi Watanabe

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0150610

Abstract

People assign the artificial words takete and kiki to spiky, angular figures and the artificial words maluma and bouba to rounded figures. We examined whether such a cross-modal correspondence could also be found for human body motion. We transferred the body movements of speakers onto two-dimensional coordinates and created animated stick-figures based on this data. Then we invited people to judge these stimuli using the words takete-maluma, bouba-kiki, and several verbal descriptors that served as measures of angularity/smoothness. In addition to this we extracted the quantity of motion, the velocity of motion and the average angle between motion vectors from the coordinate data. Judgments of takete (and kiki) were related to verbal descriptors of angularity, a high quantity of motion, high velocity and sharper angles. Judgments of maluma (or bouba) were related to smooth movements, a low velocity, a lower quantity of motion and blunter angles. A forced-choice experiment during which we presented subsets with low and high rankers on our motion measures revealed that people preferably assigned stimuli displaying fast movements with sharp angles in motion vectors to takete and stimuli displaying slow movements with blunter angles in motion vectors to maluma. Results indicated that body movements share features with information inherent in words such as takete and maluma and that people perceive the body movements of speakers on the level of changes in motion direction (e.g., body moves to the left and then back to the right). Follow-up studies are needed to clarify whether impressions of angularity and smoothness have similar communicative values across different modalities and how this affects social judgments and person perception.

Highlights

Onometopoeia, the relationship between the meaning of a word and its sound, is said to occur rarely in many languages [1]
People assign the artificial words takete and kiki to spiky, angular figures and the artificial words maluma and bouba to rounded figures. We examined whether such a cross-modal correspondence could be found for human body motion
We captured the body movements of speakers and turned their performances into short video clips of animated stick-figures. These videos were shown to participants who judged them on several descriptors of body motion and the artificial words takete-maluma and bouba-kiki

Summary

Introduction

Onometopoeia, the relationship between the meaning of a word and its sound, is said to occur rarely in many languages [1]. A famous example for this is the takete-maluma effect, which was named after an experiment devised by Köhler [2,3]. He invented the nonsense words “takete” and “maluma” and found that people preferably assigned takete to a spiky, angular figure and maluma to a rounded, curvy figure. More elaborated experiments using random combinations of certain vowels and consonants revealed that people tend to associate harsh sounding consonants such as t, k and p with spiky shapes and smooth sounding consonants such as m, l and n with rounded shapes [5]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion