We Find Some Word Sounds More Emotionally Arousing Than Others

By Emma Young Of all “cross-modal” findings, the most famous is surely the bouba-kiki effect — that we tend to pair round, blobby shapes with the sound bouba and spiky shapes with kiki. However, research has not yet revealed why this effect is common among adults who speak very different languages — and even in infants as young as four. Various theories have been put forward. One holds that levels of emotional arousal may be key — that both kiki and a spiky shape trigger relatively high levels of arousal, compared with bouba and a blob. Now a new study, reported in Psychological Science, provides compelling evidence for this idea. The researchers also take their findings further, arguing that they could have important implications for understanding the early evolution of languages. For an initial study, Arash Aryani at Freie Universität Berlin and colleagues presented English-speaking students (at Cornell University, US) with shapes and words taken from previous studies that have investigated the bouba-kiki effect. (For example, maluma vs takete, from the original 1929 report of this word/shape effect). In each case, the participants had to use a five-point scale to rate how calming or exciting they considered these words or shapes to be. The results revealed significantly higher arousal ratings for kiki-type than bouba-type words and shapes. Next, the team asked a fresh group of participants to use the same scale to rate 940 compute...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Language Perception Source Type: blogs