alt Hacker NewsAs 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.
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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.
> 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.