This GitHub repository reproduces all of the results from:
The Influence of Orthographic Features on the Bouba-Kiki Effect. Zihan Chen, Peyton Graves, Keeshia Kamura, Jeffrey Xing, Undergraduate Journal of Psychology at Berkeley (Accepted)
Abstract:
This study investigates the bouba-kiki effect, a phenomenon in which people systemically associate a word with an abstract shape (round or angular) based on the word’s phonetic features of its spoken form and orthographic features of its written form. Though the independent effect of word sound has been preliminarily demonstrated in non-literate populations, the independent effect of orthography is currently unknown. Our study attempted to examine the independent effect of orthography on Japanese characters with English speakers, to whom Japanese character sounds would be unfamiliar. Participants were randomly assigned to either only see Japanese characters or see Japanese characters while hearing a character’s sound. Participants in both groups then matched each stimulus to a round or spiky shape. Results showed that participants tended to match rounded lettering with the round abstract shape and angular lettering with the spiky shape. This demonstrates a significant effect of orthography on the bouba-kiki effect across all conditions, suggesting that lettering influences the bouba-kiki effect regardless of sound. Additionally, we explored the impact of mentally transcribing Japanese sounds to its referred English spelling on word-shape matching. We found a significant effect of English letter shape derived from the Japanese sound, but no significant effect of sound type. This suggests that participants were influenced by the sound, but relied on the referred English orthography derived from the sound to produce the bouba-kiki effect.