Bouba/Kiki Effect

Bouba/Kiki Effect

Quick, if I show you these two shapes, and I tell you one is called a "Kiki", and one is called a "Bouba", which is which?

The Bouba/Kiki Effect was discovered by German-American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929.

The vast majority of people of any native language call the one on the left a Kiki, and the one on the right a Bouba. My guess was the same. There is just something pointy about Kiki and blobby about Bouba. Strange eh? One of the more interesting tidbits in the Wikipedia article is that people with autism do not pick the names with the same frequencies that other people do. I have no understanding of such things, so I just note this.