Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2017 Aug 25;8(4):2041669517724807.
doi: 10.1177/2041669517724807. eCollection 2017 Jul-Aug.

When Does Maluma/Takete Fail? Two Key Failures and a Meta-Analysis Suggest That Phonology and Phonotactics Matter

Suzy J Styles  1 , Lauren Gawne  2
Affiliations

When Does Maluma/Takete Fail? Two Key Failures and a Meta-Analysis Suggest That Phonology and Phonotactics Matter

Suzy J Styles et al. Iperception. .

Abstract

Eighty-seven years ago, Köhler reported that the majority of students picked the same answer in a quiz: Which novel word form ('maluma' or 'takete') went best with which abstract line drawing (one curved, one angular). Others have consistently shown the effect in a variety of contexts, with only one reported failure by Rogers and Ross. In the spirit of transparency, we report our own failure in the same journal. In our study, speakers of Syuba, from the Himalaya in Nepal, do not show a preference when matching word forms 'kiki' and 'bubu' to spiky versus curvy shapes. We conducted a meta-analysis of previous studies to investigate the relationship between pseudoword legality and task effects. Our combined analyses suggest a common source for both of the failures: 'wordiness' - We believe these tests fail when the test words do not behave according to the sound structure of the target language.

Keywords: cross-cultural perception; cross-modal congruence; language-specific perception; pseudoword legality; sound symbolism.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Syuba-speaking participants making kiki/bubu decisions in Nepal, with photographs of the physical object tokens used in decision-making.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Prevalence rates of speech-sounds across 1,672 languages. Data from PHOIBLE Online. Colour scale indicates range from the listed percentage to the next highest. For data tables underlying this figure, see the Open Science Framework repository for this article (https://osf.io/wt95v/).
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Forest plot of published maluma/takete effects for canonical stimuli. 1 to 13: Pseudowords “legal.” META: Results of the random effects meta-analysis. A to C: “legality” of pseudowords questionable for some groups of participants. *Participants articulated pseudoword before matching shape to word form. Chance response rate (50%) marked with dashed line. Horizontal bars show 95% CIs. X no SE available. For further details of the Forest Plot, see Supplementary Materials and the Open Science Framework repository for this article (https://osf.io/wt95v/).
None
None
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Best C., McRoberts G., Goodell E. (2001) American listeners’ perception of non-native consonant contrasts varying in perceptual assimilation to English phonology. Journal of Acoustical Society of America 109: 775–794. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Bremner A. J., Caparos S., Davidoff J., Fockert J. D., Linnell K. J., Spence C. (2013) “Bouba” and “Kiki” in Namibia? A remote culture make similar shape–sound matches, but different shape–taste matches to Westerners. Cognition 126: 165–172. - PubMed
    1. Childs G. T. (2014) Constraints on violating constraints: How languages reconcile the twin dicta of “Be different” and “Be recognizably language.”. Pragmatics and Society 5: 341–354.
    1. Diffloth, G. (1979). Expressive phonology and prosaic phonology in Mon Khmer. In T. L. Thongkum, et al. (Eds.), Studies in Tai and Mon-Khmer phonetics and phonology: In honour of Eugenie J. A. Henderson (pp. 49–59). Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Press.
    1. Dingemanse M. (2012) Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. Language and Linguistics Compass 6: 654–672. doi:10.1002/lnc3.361.

LinkOut - more resources