kiki bouba, Copyright Urban Mole 2016
I read a German children’s book on woods and woodland creatures recently, and found myself stuck on page fifteen saying “hohl, hohl, hohl” like a Danish Santa Claus. It means hollow, and it makes hollow when you say it. Hohl. It’s connected to words like English hole and cave (holh in Old English). Say it at night at the edge of the woods and a bat will fly into your mouth.
It won’t, because you’re not Ozzy Osborne, but it illustrates the soft power of phonaesthesia or sound symbolism, whereby specific sounds correlate with specific meanings. The gl sound is often used as an example, found in many English words relating to shiny things (glitter, glimmer, glisten, glint, etc.); it’s found as well in the vocabularies of other Germanic languages. The vowel i plays an important role here as well, appearing in light, bright, brilliant, and vivid, as well as crossing oceans to appear in the Japanese kirakira (glittering), and crossing time to appear in Plato’s Cratylus dialogue, where it imitates every subtle, penetrating element.
Cratylus and Hermogenes were having it out in ancient Greece over the origin of words. Cratylus was the glitter, glimmer guy, believing words to be comprised of sounds that represent ideas. The vowel i, mentioned above, is voiced with the tongue almost at rest, and hence denotes subtlety: ienai (moving), iesthai (hastening). Well, says Hermogenes, the ‘names are conventional’ guy, you also state that l sounds denote the liquid flow of things, whereas g sounds bring things to a stop. So gl words denote a sticky, cloying nature, like glukus (sweet). Cratylus nods enthusiastically at this. Hermogenes continues: but is it not true that in under two millennia, languages will develop such as English in which the gl sound denotes shininess? At this point Socrates steps in, wanting to make a point about the organic nature of language, but instead ruling that the study of things is better than the study of words and ushering the two gentleman out into the world to investigate.
But phonaesthesia is underpinned by more than philosophic reason, and those passing millennia left a fossil record of sound-sense correlation as languages evolved. Enter science and psychology. Wolfgang Köhler devised an experiment in 1947 to test whether something’s name could be indicative of something’s shape [1]. Is takete pointy or rounded? What about maluma? Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated his experiment in 2001 using the words kiki and bouba [2]. A significant proportion of participants assigned maluma and bouba to the curvy shape, and takete and kiki to the pointy.
Of course, morphologically, *k* looks pointy and b looks curvy; the shape of the word itself could be influencing the decision. But studies on pre-literate children [3] produced similar results, as did studies on the remote Himba of Northern Namibia who have no form of written language [4]. The sounds may well be denoting the shapes.
Let’s take it up a neuroscientific notch. It’s possible that phonaesthesia is a product of multisensory (cross-modal) integration: that data from multiple senses are collated to produce an effect similar to (though more mild than) synaesthesia. Aside from the implication that we’re all synaesthetes to a lesser or greater extent, it implies that people with developmental disorders affecting cross-modal integration — people with autism, for example — will be less able, or even unable, to experience phonaesthesia. This proves to be the case when tested experimentally [5].
Neuroscientific notch +1: there are EEG data available that show that ideophones (sound-symbolic words) have a detectable effect on brain activity: ideophones produce a larger visual response than arbitrary words (it’s Cratylus versus Hermogenes again). The data are from a study of the effect of Japanese ideophones and arbitrary adverbs on the P2 response (you throw a stone into a pond and measure the ripples that reach the shore around 200 milliseconds later — that’s the P2) [6]. The P2 response is associated with visual stimuli (among many other, not universally agreed upon things). This implies that ideophones may be generating some sort of visual effect, despite being auditory in nature. Cross-modal integration. You’re hearing sounds and perceiving shapes. Either the rumours of LSD in the water are true, or our brains process sense data in a much more integrated way than we’re consciously aware of. The question is: have we learnt, as we developed into adulthood, to filter the signal, ignoring its synaesthetic qualities? This is where poetry comes in.
Many poets, at some point or another, encounter synaesthisia because they are looking for ways to discohere the stable illusion of the senses. ‘To hear the green heat on the field hearth’ may or may not be a good way to describe spring, but it edges us closer to the familiar world described with familiar words in unfamiliar ways. Phonaesthesia, in comparison to synaesthesia, can be more subtle, can be present in simple-seeming lines, repeating across stanzas, at work behind the scenes, chucked beneath the surface of the pond and the P2 response. It’s something we can learn to be aware of; a sensitivity that can be added to our susceptibility.
References:
[1] Köhler, W. *Gestalt Psychology: An Introduction to New Concepts in Modern Psychology*, Liveright Publishing Corporation; 2Rev Ed edition (1 July 1992), ISBN-13: 978-0871402189
[2] Ramachandran, V. S., and Hubbard, E. M. (2001). Synaesthesia — A Window Into Perception, Thought and Language, *Journal of Consciousness Studies* 8(12):3-34
[3] Ozturk O, Krehm M, Vouloumanos A. (2013). Sound symbolism in infancy: evidence for sound-shape cross-modal correspondences in 4-month-olds.
*J Exp Child Psychol*. 114(2):173-86. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2012.05.004.
[4] Bremner, A. J., Caparos, S., Davidoff, J., de Fockert, J, Linnell, K. J., Spence, C. (2013). “Bouba” and “Kiki” in Namibia? A remote culture make similar shape-sound matches, but different shape-taste matches to Westerners. *Cognition* 126(2):165-72. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.09.007
[5] Occelli, V., Esposito, G., Venuti, P., Arduino, G.M., Zampini, M. (2013). The Takete-Maluma phenomenon in autism spectrum disorders. *Perception* 42(2):233-41. doi: 10.1068/p7357
[6] Lockwood, G., Tuomainen, J. (2015). Ideophones in Japanese modulate the P2 and late positive complex responses.
*Frontiers in Psychology* 6, 933 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00933
Leave a Reply