Bouba Effect
Kiki Effect · Ideasthesia
A non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and visual shapes — rounded shapes tend to be associated with soft-sounding words like "bouba," while jagged shapes are matched with sharp-sounding words like "kiki" — observed across languages and cultures.
EverydayConcepts.io
Origin
In 1929, Wolfgang Köhler reported in Gestalt Psychology that participants strongly preferred to pair jagged shapes with "takete" and rounded shapes with "maluma." V. S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard replicated and renamed it in 2001, introducing "bouba" and "kiki" and finding 95–98% agreement among both American and Tamil-speaking participants.
Updated June 1, 2018