Comment by Timon3
2 hours ago
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.