DrProfresher
12 hours ago
As a human I agree with dogs that 'Bouba' is round and 'Kiki' is spiky.
In all seriousness, and I am surprised the article does not mention this, as dumb as it sounds Kiki has "sharp" sounds when pronouncing it and "Bouba" has a softer feel to it when pronouncing it.
As the article says it does not matter what language you speak, a word that quickly changes the sound back and forth to the same thing sounds sharp because that is how sharp things look and feel. The serration on a knife has the same angle on either side leading to a point. This is what makes sense to me as to why we correspond Kiki to something sharp.
yhjc2692
9 hours ago
Interestingly, even the sound of the word ‘round’ feels gentle, while the word ‘spiky’ has high-frequency peaks (at p and k)! I wonder if dogs (or for that matter, humans) can accurately zero-shot classify words that represent round vs spiky for different languages.
It appears to me that onomatopoeia, at varying degrees, played a role in the spontaneous convergence of verbal communication, and thus the development of a language.