When we hear certain sounds, our brains often pair them with specific shapes. For example, most people will associate a sharp-sounding word with a jagged, pointed shape, while a soft, rolling word is ...

When people are shown a spiky shape next to a rounded one and asked which shape is called "kiki" and which one is "bouba," people from all kinds of cultures overwhelmingly associate "bouba" with the ...

In 1947, German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler discovered that people automatically associate certain sounds with certain visual stimuli. In his original study, observers consistently associated the ...

Why does “bouba” sound round and “kiki” sound spiky? This intuition that ties certain sounds to shapes is oddly reliable all over the world. For at least a century scientists have considered this ...