Mathilde, F. , Alexa, W. , Alexander, M. & Sharon, P.
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (DEC-ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Paris, France
The link between a speech sound and its meaning is supposed to be arbitrary (De Saussure, 1959). However, adults and toddlers systematically associate certain pseudowords, such as ?bouba? and ?kiki?, with round and spiky shapes, respectively (Maurer et al., 2006; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). We investigated whether this ?bouba-kiki effect? is present since the first stages of ontological development (i.e., in pre-lexical infants) or arises later with language experience. To our knowledge, only one study has reported such sound symbolic associations in prelexical infants (4 mo, Ozturk et al., 2012), but the number of infants (N=12) and stimuli (2 combinations of shape-pseudoword) was very small.
Here, we report three experiments with 5- and 6-month-olds that found no bouba-kiki effect at all. In Experiment 1 and 2, French 6-month-old infants (N=24 per Exp.) were presented with 12 different combinations of a shape and multiple tokens of a pseudoword, half congruent (e.g., round shape + /buba/), half incongruent (e.g., round shape + /kike/). Infants did not show any looking time difference for congruent versus incongruent pairings when the shape was still (Experiment 1) or when it was growing/shrinking in synchrony with the presentation of the pseudo-word (Experiment 2). They only looked longer overall at the round shapes (Experiment 1). In Experiment 3, twenty-four five-month-old infants were presented with 28 different combinations of two side-by-side shapes (one round, one spiky), with five repetitions of one pseudoword token. Again, we only found a preference for the round shapes. To conclude, in three experiments using carefully controlled stimuli and different paradigms, we failed to find a bouba-kiki effect in prelexical infants. We argue that the evidence for a bouba-kiki effect in prelexical infants so far is weak and that null results like the present ones should not be kept in a drawer.