Maluma & Takete

On the arbitraryness of the relation between shape and sound;




Wolfgang Kohler (1929) showed subjects two nonsense visual shapes, one rounded and the other angular and invented two nonsense words as names for them, MALUMA and TAKETE and asked to associate with each shape one of the invented words. If the designation is arbitrary, one would expect a random distribution of matchings, and approximately 50 percent of the subjects should assign "maluma" to the rounded figure and 50 percent to the angular figure.
However, the majority of subjects assigned MALUMA to the rounded shape and TAKETE to the angular shape.

Ramachandran and Hubbard suggest that the kiki/bouba effect has implications for the evolution of language, because it suggests that the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary
See: the Bouba/kiki effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect