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Dogs seem to agree with humans that 'bouba' is round and 'kiki' is spiky

55 points gmays 19 hours ago 35 comments

DoctorOetker 4 days ago | parent

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.

po1nt 29 minutes ago | parent

The question is how are you able to internalise the shape without ever seeing any visualisation. Why does the the bouba even evoke curvature?

notahacker 22 minutes ago | parent

tbf for me the Bouba evokes curvature because it makes me think of a Baobab tree. Not so sure about the dogs :)

D-Machine 13 minutes ago | parent

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).

DrProfresher 18 hours ago | parent

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.

yhjc2692 15 hours ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

Across multiple non-European languages?

jstanley 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

card_zero 59 minutes ago | parent

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.)

D-Machine 48 minutes ago | parent

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.

jjtheblunt 37 minutes ago | parent

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 21 minutes ago | parent

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".

Waterluvian 43 minutes ago | parent

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.

_kulang 36 minutes ago | parent

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.

gsich 35 minutes ago | parent

>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).

dang 1 hour ago | parent

Related. Others?

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)

dang 1 hour ago | parent

These might also be loosely related (since bouba/kiki came up in the threads):

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)

dizhn 1 hour ago | parent

For me kiki is more red than spiky.

jurf 37 minutes ago | parent

(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 16 minutes ago | parent

We're about to land in kaka territory with this one.

throw9394030 22 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

preommr 17 minutes ago | parent

> I get assaulted all the time, by dog owners who unleash their dogs on me, in self defense.

???

pixl97 15 minutes ago | parent

Just your average run of the mill HN serial killer.

D-Machine 16 minutes ago | parent

> 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...

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 15 minutes ago | parent

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 7 minutes ago | parent

Self defense is claimed by dog owners. I do not understand why they do that. But it is far from uncommon.

Perhaps just hate. It is well established dog owners hate runners, cyclists, delivery workers, cats, ducks...

idiotsecant 10 minutes ago | parent

You seem like a perfectly reasonable not crazy person.

throw9394030 4 minutes ago | parent

I am just running at park, nothing crazy like randomly assaulting strangers!

leoc 21 minutes ago | parent

Good boys! Good boys.

profsummergig 14 minutes ago | parent

Is 'bouba' pronounced 'bowba', 'bohba', or 'booba'? And why isn't it spelled like that instead?

gste 12 minutes ago | parent

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.