[HN Gopher] Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naive baby chicks
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Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naive baby chicks
Author : suddenlybananas
Score : 172 points
Date : 2026-02-21 21:51 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| verteu wrote:
| Preprint:
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.17.594640v1....
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| Believe it or not: This is pure and unadulterated advancement of
| civilization.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Please elaborate.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| This is irony. The study is stupid, society has reached a
| stupid stage of development. Kiki and bouba explain nothing
| and serve nothing. Culture is in shambles.
| mastercheif wrote:
| Okay Gemini
| ChrisClark wrote:
| If you don't recognize a quote, it's obviously AI? Might want
| to rethink your logic, or outsource it to AI. Might help you
| a115ltd wrote:
| This is just one micro-instance of a much larger thing. Brain
| encodes structural similarity across modalities. Corollary:
| language is far from arbitrary labels for things.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| >language is far from arbitrary labels for things
|
| I think this is a misunderstanding of the arbitrariness of the
| sign. Arbitrary doesn't mean "random" or "uniformly sampled."
| The fact there are systematic tendencies among languages in how
| things are called doesn't negate the arbitrariness of the sign,
| they _could_ have been called other things. We can also decide
| to refer to things by another name and we can use any arbitrary
| name we like! There is no limits on what names we can use
| (besides silly physiological constraints like having a word
| with 50 000 consonants). But, of course, there 's much more to
| language than just labels!
|
| For me, the interesting thing in this paper vis-a-vis language
| is that it shows how much innate structure in cognition must
| shape our language.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Arbitrariness of the sign is a principle that requires so
| many epicycles to present as "true" that it's more of a
| warning against overgeneralization than an insight with any
| significant predictive power in its own right.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Let's call the arbitrariness of the sign, blinga. Why do
| you think blinga requires "epicycles"? Blinga makes pretty
| modest claims: there is no _requirement_ that the form of a
| sign matches that which it signifies in any way.
| downboots wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name
| andrewflnr wrote:
| No, language is still pretty close to arbitrary labels. The
| handful of tenuous common threads like the bouba-kiki effect
| don't change the overall picture that much. The simple fact
| that language varies as much as it does is sufficient to prove
| that it's only loosely bound to anything universal.
| tetris11 wrote:
| What's the N value of this study
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I don't know, but it really should be in units of N dozen.
| Recursing wrote:
| From the preprint linked above:
|
| > We tested a total of 42 subjects, 17 of which were females.
| selridge wrote:
| The published one repeated the experiment w/ day old chicks
| and IIRC the same number w/ the same results, so it's got a
| little more N than the preprint.
| thesmtsolver2 wrote:
| All the universal translators in fiction make more sense now lol.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| I think it's natural to think of this in terms of frequencies so
| the kiki shape has a higher visual frequency. As does the word
| have a higher audio frequencies within in than bouba so that is
| naturally associated with the lower frequency undulating line of
| that shape.
| downboots wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44280619 it's a good
| analogy.
| alienbaby wrote:
| Is this not reducible to whether a speech sound contains
| fricatives and stops or not? They produce spiky sounds
|
| But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky
| shapes, though surely it's because they represent sharp immediate
| changes in frequency?
|
| I'd be interested on results of shapes imagined when you take the
| source as musical or other non speech sounds.
| selridge wrote:
| >But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky
| shapes
|
| I think the why just got a lot tricker than we imagined.
| Because we failed to replicate this experiment on other
| primates, we couldn't avoid a semantic suspicion about those
| associations. Now we probably have to set semantics aside or
| let it get a lot weirder, because we can replicate across
| ~300My.
|
| >surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in
| frequency?
|
| Maybe, and I think "multi-sensory signal processing" is the
| best framing, but the representation could also carry harder to
| think about things like "harm".
|
| It's also super cool because the bouba-kiki effect framing was
| chosen due to methodological convenience for linguists and
| cultural anthropologists and their experimental bounds, not
| neuroscientists or signal processing folks. We could
| potentially find other experiments quickly, since chicks are a
| model organism and the mechanism is clear.
|
| Things could move fast here.
| canjobear wrote:
| > But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky
| shapes, though surely it's because they represent sharp
| immediate changes in frequency?
|
| Sure, but it's a very abstract connection between objects being
| sharp in vision and frequencies changing sharply in hearing.
| There's no guarantee any given organism would make the
| connection.
| oasisaimlessly wrote:
| I don't think it's abstract at all. Rub something sharp
| (anything from a stick to a phonograph needle) on an object
| and you'll directly transcribe its spatial frequency spectrum
| into an audio frequency spectrum.
| canjobear wrote:
| Do you think it's obvious that a chick would understand
| that connection?
| fzeindl wrote:
| In the book ,,the design of everyday things" it is mentioned
| that ,,natural mappings" exist. Moving the knob of a vertical
| slider to the upper end universally means ,,brighter" or
| ,,louder", not ,,less bright" or ,,more silent".
| 5- wrote:
| maybe the chicks and norman get it, but i'm currently
| renting an apartment in france that has a bunch of these
| light switches installed all upside down, with "-" at the
| top:
|
| https://www.legrand.com.gh/en/catalog/products/arteor-
| push-b...
| IsTom wrote:
| > Moving the knob of a vertical slider to the upper end
| universally means ,,brighter" or ,,louder", not ,,less
| bright" or ,,more silent".
|
| Except for the organ drawbars?
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Which way would a vertical weight slider go?
| gnarlouse wrote:
| baba is keke
| the__alchemist wrote:
| baba is you
| keyle wrote:
| I'm not entirely sold by this discovery. For example when you
| learn to train dogs, you learn about the 3 voices. Encouraging
| voice, atta boy, negative voice, more stern, and the big "NO!".
|
| To some degree these words type sounding language are doing the
| same thing. Some sounds will irk, some will soothe, and it would
| affect this 'evidence' found.
| spagettnet wrote:
| I think the researchers agree with your premise. The "evidence"
| is not that chicks have more language understanding than
| previously understood, but rather that the source of the
| universality of bouba/kiki is due to something more primitive
| than built in human language hardware.
| patcon wrote:
| I'm very intrigued by this, but I'll be much more interested when
| this is replicated on non-domesticated animals...!
|
| It must take some strange things to survive co-evolution with
| humans for several thousands years
| bad_username wrote:
| Objects that have sharp edges generate higher frequency harmonics
| when agitated, because lower-size features resonate on higher
| frequencies (like shorter strings ring on higher pitch). Objects
| that are round resonate on low frequencies only. The "kiki" sound
| has more high frequency content than the "bouba" sound, and it's
| no mystery why the brain associates one with the other.
| mnbs wrote:
| That's what I was thinking. But then I was wondering: if it was
| that obvoius, would there be such research about it?
| ACCount37 wrote:
| You do need to research "obvious" things every once in a
| while. They have this annoying tendency of being proven wrong
| occasionally.
| rcxdude wrote:
| It's a hypothesis. How would you prove or disprove that it's
| because of that? (and I would say, a priori, it's not utterly
| obvious that the brain would relate spacial and temporal
| frequencies like this)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Some of the research, including this paper, is trying to get
| at the question of whether a species' sensitivity to the
| bouba-kiki effect might be at the root of language or not.
| Since it seems accepted that chickens do not have language in
| any meaningful sense of that term, finding that they still
| show this effect decouples it from "the origins of language".
| IsTom wrote:
| In nature there's few things laying around that resonate
| particularly well.
| maybewhenthesun wrote:
| Scratch a thin pointy branch across e rock -> sharp high
| noise.
|
| Thump a round club/log against a rock -> dull bump noise
| IsTom wrote:
| Thump two round rocks together -> sharp noise
|
| Thump pointy branch against a tree -> dull noise
|
| And chickens aren't using tools.
| blurbleblurble wrote:
| They're scratching for gizzard stones and food though,
| with their built-in beak, fwiw
| sixsevenrot wrote:
| I challenge you to find two objects of a similar size and
| cut them into shapes that would produce a sharper sound
| for the rounder object.
|
| In your example it's obviously the round tree trunk that
| produces the dull sound.
| aaptel wrote:
| I thought the same but they used chicks that just hatched with
| zero world experience.
| amelius wrote:
| World experience can be encoded through evolution.
|
| E.g. a spider does not learn if/how to weave a web from its
| parents.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| That's one theory. Another one I can think of is that sharp
| edges are scary, and most distress calls are high pitched.
|
| Also, the thing about high frequencies and sharp edges lead to
| a contradiction: babies are more round than adults and produce
| higher pitched sounds, this is almost universal across all
| species.
|
| There are other tentative explanations, such as how the vocal
| tract acts when producing these sounds, with "bouba" sounds
| being the result of smoother movement more reminiscent of a
| round shape.
|
| "kiki" is not just higher pitched, it is also "shaped"
| differently if you look at the sound envelope, with, as
| expected, sharper transitions.
|
| So to me, the mystery is still there. Is is the kind of thing
| that sounds obvious, in the same way that kiki sounds obviously
| sharper than bouba, but is not.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| So then the mystery would be why other primates do _not_ appear
| to show the bouba-kiki effect ...
| Strilanc wrote:
| For each chick they do 24 trials divided into 4 blocks with
| retraining on the ambiguous shape and actual rewards after each
| block. During the actual tests they didn't give rewards. In
| figure 1 they show the data bucketed by trial index. It's a bit
| surprising it doesn't show any apparent effect vs trial number,
| e.g. the first trial after retraining being slightly different.
|
| I have to admit I'm super skeptical there's not some stupid
| mistake here. Definitely thought provoking. But I wish they'd
| kept iteratively removing elements until the correlation stopped
| happening, so they could nail down causation more precisely.
| K0balt wrote:
| I wonder if this is a result of a Fourier transform type
| operation that turns the serial time domain into something that
| can be processed in parallel?
| saalweachter wrote:
| As someone with a passing familiarity with both baby chicks and
| experimental setups, I have strong doubts about this research.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| Very likely this experiment suffered from a lack of thorough
| double blind control. Researcher bias may have generated subtle
| subconscious queues to the chicks on which shape to pick
| unrelated to the sounds.
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