[HN Gopher] Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naive baby chicks
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Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naive baby chicks
Author : suddenlybananas
Score : 98 points
Date : 2026-02-21 21:51 UTC (7 hours ago)
HTML web link (www.science.org)
TEXT w3m dump (www.science.org)
| verteu wrote:
| Preprint:
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.17.594640v1....
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| Believe it or not: This is pure and unadulterated advancement of
| civilization.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Please elaborate.
| goodJobWalrus wrote:
| I looked it up, according to Google:
|
| 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.
| teraflop wrote:
| An interesting explanation that happens to be completely
| hallucinated. That line doesn't appear anywhere in either
| the play or the movie.
| goodJobWalrus wrote:
| ha, ha, and they say AI does not hallucinate anymore!
| mastercheif wrote:
| Okay Gemini
| ChrisClark wrote:
| If you don't recognize a quote, it's obviously AI? Might want
| to rethink your logic, or outsource it to AI. Might help you
| a115ltd wrote:
| This is just one micro-instance of a much larger thing. Brain
| encodes structural similarity across modalities. Corollary:
| language is far from arbitrary labels for things.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| >language is far from arbitrary labels for things
|
| 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-a-vis language
| is that it shows how much innate structure in cognition must
| shape our language.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Arbitrariness of the sign is a principle that requires so
| many epicycles to present as "true" that it's more of a
| warning against overgeneralization than an insight with any
| significant predictive power in its own right.
| downboots wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name
| andrewflnr wrote:
| No, language is still pretty close to arbitrary labels. The
| handful of tenuous common threads like the bouba-kiki effect
| don't change the overall picture that much. The simple fact
| that language varies as much as it does is sufficient to prove
| that it's only loosely bound to anything universal.
| tetris11 wrote:
| What's the N value of this study
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I don't know, but it really should be in units of N dozen.
| Recursing wrote:
| From the preprint linked above:
|
| > We tested a total of 42 subjects, 17 of which were females.
| selridge wrote:
| The published one repeated the experiment w/ day old chicks
| and IIRC the same number w/ the same results, so it's got a
| little more N than the preprint.
| thesmtsolver2 wrote:
| All the universal translators in fiction make more sense now lol.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| I think it's natural to think of this in terms of frequencies so
| the kiki shape has a higher visual frequency. As does the word
| have a higher audio frequencies within in than bouba so that is
| naturally associated with the lower frequency undulating line of
| that shape.
| alienbaby wrote:
| Is this not reducible to whether a speech sound contains
| fricatives and stops or not? They produce spiky sounds
|
| 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.
| selridge wrote:
| >But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky
| shapes
|
| 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.
| canjobear wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| baba is keke
| the__alchemist wrote:
| baba is you
| keyle wrote:
| I'm not entirely sold by this discovery. For example when you
| learn to train dogs, you learn about the 3 voices. Encouraging
| voice, atta boy, negative voice, more stern, and the big "NO!".
|
| 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.
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