Abstract
It has been suggested that the Bouba/Kiki effect, in which meaningless speech sounds are systematically mapped onto rounded or angular shapes, reflects a universal crossmodal correspondence between audition and vision. Here, radial frequency (RF) patterns were adapted in order to compare the Bouba/Kiki effect in Eastern and Western participants demonstrating different perceptual styles. Three attributes of the RF patterns were manipulated: The frequency, amplitude, and spikiness of the sinusoidal modulations along the circumference of a circle. By testing participants in the US and Taiwan, both cultural commonalities and differences in sound-shape correspondence were revealed. RF patterns were more likely to be matched with “Kiki” than with “Bouba” when the frequency, amplitude, and spikiness increased. The responses from both groups of participants had a similar weighting on frequency; nevertheless, the North Americans had a higher weighting on amplitude, but a lower weighting on spikiness, than their Taiwanese counterparts. These novel results regarding cultural differences suggest that the Bouba/Kiki effect is partly tuned by differing perceptual experience. In addition, using the RF patterns in the Bouba/Kiki effect provides a “mid-level” linkage between visual and auditory processing, and a future understanding of sound-shape correspondences based on the mechanism of visual pattern processing.
Highlights
Bombarded by massive amounts of sensory information, the human brain tries to make sense of the world by associating the signals in different sensory modalities that likely belong to the same objects and events
Others have suggested that the Bouba/Kiki effect may be associated with statistical learning processes to form a type of metaphorical representations in human perception[20,21,22], with rounded shapes associated with lower-pitched sound whilst angular shapes are associated with higher-pitched sound instead[23,24,25]
The results demonstrated that all three factors were significant predictors of participants’ performance in both the US and Taiwanese groups; differences between groups were observed
Summary
Bombarded by massive amounts of sensory information, the human brain tries to make sense of the world by associating the signals in different sensory modalities that likely belong to the same objects and events. Others have suggested that the Bouba/Kiki effect may be associated with statistical learning processes to form a type of metaphorical representations in human perception[20,21,22], with rounded shapes associated with lower-pitched sound whilst angular shapes are associated with higher-pitched sound instead[23,24,25]. It is thought that such crossmodal correspondences between visual and auditory features are established on the basis of their statistical co-occurrence in daily perceptual experience[2]; in addition, certain abstract (or modality-general) semantic/conceptual representations associating various attributes of an object may be formed (such as that sharp objects like knives produce high-pitched sound[26])
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