Comment by Wolfenstein98k
9 hours ago
Maybe because when you pronounce a B, it's very hard to make it sound sharp. The lips rolling off one another naturally have a gentle ramp-up. It's really hard to have a sudden transient. You can record this in a free DAW and see it in front of you.
By contrast, it's very hard to make a K- sound without a sharp transient.
With B you are adding pressure to two soft tissues in contact.
With K you are adding pressure when one tissue is hard, and saliva is present (causing a relatively sudden production of the sound).
Try making B sound sharp, hard to do while saying Bouba.
Try making K sound soft, basically impossible, especially while saying Kiki.
While this explains why the sounds are sharp/soft, IMO the interesting part is: why is there seemingly such a fundamental connection between "sharpness" in spoken language, and "sharpness" in our (visual) understanding of the world?
These two concepts are not fully equal, so why don't we have two different words and see them as separate concepts?
I believe you're looking at this like a classic programmer and that's why you're thinking "bouba.jpg" and "bouba.wav" are two different concepts. I used to think of the bouba kiki issue from that POV too. A good (and imo better) modern analog to the human brain thought process is a LLM that can definitely match different inputs to a single concept. Also the vocal cords have very specific shapes in the vowel continuum and that alone would help explain why for humans it's simply intuitive.
There's also another comment mentioning how it works for consonants, which I believe helps explain how it might work for dogs.