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.
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.
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.
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.
It must take some strange things to survive co-evolution with humans for several thousands years
This phrase is a direct quote from the 1955 play (and 1960 film) Inherit the Wind, spoken by the character Henry Drummond (based on Clarence Darrow) regarding the teaching of evolution. It frames scientific education and intellectual freedom as the ultimate, pure progress of human civilization, contrasting with dogmatic resistance.
Context: The line refers to the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial, which debated the legality of teaching evolution in Tennessee schools.
Significance: It serves as a dramatic defense of modernism, science, and freedom of thought against traditionalist views.
Cultural Impact: While based on historical events, the play uses this line to argue that intellectual inquiry is the cornerstone of advancement.
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-à-vis language is that it shows how much innate structure in cognition must shape our language.