Looks Like It Sounds
Meet Bouba and Kiki. Who’s who? You probably already know. Without prompting, over 95% of people instinctively assign “Kiki” to the jagged, spiky shape and “Bouba” to the soft, round one. But why?
What we know today as the Bouba-Kiki effect was first documented in 1929 by German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. Using the pseudowords “takete” and “maluma,” Köhler found that people consistently paired “takete" with angular shapes and “maluma” with rounded ones. Nearly a century later, the words have changed, but the findings persist – replicated across languages, cultures, and even among pre-linguistic children. The effect is a doorway into the distinctive architecture of human language and attention.
Our brains seek harmony and congruence, intuiting patterns that often make intuitive sense, mapping sound to shape, movement to emotion, sensation to meaning. The sharp staccato syllables of “Kiki” feel like they belong to something pointed; “Bouba” rolls gently off the tongue, echoing the curve it's meant to describe.
Researchers have turned to this effect to explore the origins and evolution of language itself, challenging the notion that words are random or disconnected from the concepts they aim to convey. Instead, Bouba and Kiki seem to further bond attention and language in their mutually constitutive powers – each shaping and shaped by the other – in service of a deeper drive for coherence: a quiet, intuitive knowledge that some things just fit.