5 ms·

Baby chicks pass the bouba-kiki test, challenging a theory of language evolution

89 points by beardyw 8mo ago

c22 8mo ago
Front page two days ago, 62 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105198
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
suddenlybananas 8mo ago
I don't really see how it challenges any theory of language evolution. The bouba kiki effect is hardly necessary nor important for having language.
- retsibsi 8mo ago
  This is downvoted, perhaps as a 'lazy dismissal'? But I read the SciAm article and I don't think it actually explained this point. The finding seems to be that the bouba-kiki effect is not specific to humans and does not depend on experience. And the previously-existing theory is presented like so: > scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning. The finding is supposed to undermine, or at least challenge, the theory. But why? Is the point just that, if other species also have the bouba-kiki effect but do not have language, the bouba-kiki effect probably doesn't play as important a role as we thought? That seems to be the implication (though the innate/learned distinction also seems to be relevant, and I'm not sure why that is) -- but surely the bouba-kiki effect was never believed to be anything like a sufficient condition for the development of language, was it?
  - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
    Yeah I'm not sure why it's being downvoted, I don't dismiss the study at all (I'm the one who originally posted it!). I just think the scientific reporting on it is very odd. It's an interesting study in terms of what it has to say about innate vs learnt associations. >scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning. I suppose just working in linguistics, I find this such a fringe and unserious theory. The hard part of language isn't associating sounds with objects (dogs can do that), it's putting those words together to make novel meanings.
  - owyn 8mo ago
    The word "challenge" in the article title is clickbait. I guess the assumption challenged is that this measurable effect is for humans only because we are so special? Good as a headline for a non-science audience that mostly doesn't believe in evolution. It's pretty obvious that our auditory and visual systems are older than humanity as a species. I'd be surprised if the results were anything but confirming. Chickens are not going to learn English. Other species use sound to communicate and that this effect is measurable is pretty cool.
    - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
      But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language. It's a theory that mistakenly thinks that hard problem in language is coming up with words for objects instead of the actually hard problem of combining words in a systematic way.
      - lillesvin 8mo ago
        > But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language. Do you have a source on that? Because I would expect anyone studying sound symbolism to find the bouba-kiki effect extremely important which is probably why it's such a widely cited study, also inside linguistics.
        suddenlybananas 8mo ago
        It's hard to find a source for that kind of negative statement. Kiki-bouba is important for sound-symbolism definitely! But sound-symbolism is marginal when it comes to language. Iconicity and similar things are very interesting phenomena but they're not the difficult part of language at all and they're not necessary parts of language.
        lillesvin 8mo ago
        I obviously don't know your background but out of the linguists that I know and have met while doing my degrees in linguistics, I don't know of anyone who would say that the kiki-bouba effect is not important — anything, in fact, that challenges the notion that sound-meaning relations are completely arbitrary is interesting because it might give us clues about the origins of language, not to mention that it lends support to other, related hypotheses about sound-symbolism. I'm not sure what you mean by "not necessary parts of language", but I would love to hear what you think the necessary parts of language are. Not to mention, what is "the difficult part of language" then?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- n4r9 8mo ago
  I fonud the following Wikipedia section somewhat useful for understanding the context here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect#Implications_for_understanding_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect#Implications... Annoyingly, very few of the citations are accessible. But the gist as I understand it is that this challenges various proposed explanations for the Bouba-Kiki effect, for example that it relates to human physiology or has a human-specific neurological basis.
hiuioejfjkf 8mo ago
[dead]
bitwize 8mo ago
Maybe it goes to show that animals just have some of the same brain structures associated with language that we do. Parrots are capable of rather sophisticated language use, and the informal word-button experiments suggest that non-avian animals like cats and dogs display some linguistic ability. So the bouba-kiki effect in animals shouldn't be terribly surprising. Certain mammals and birds perhaps may best be thought of as prelinguistic.
- Frotag 8mo ago
  > the informal word-button experiments suggest that non-avian animals like cats and dogs I always wanted to see long form content on this. Like I'm sure the cherrypicked clips make it look more impressive than reality but I've owned enough pets to believe they can understand more than just individual words / tone.
  - Cieric 8mo ago
    Here is a video that I actually just watched recently on that exact thing. https://youtu.be/jfLAaGtNc7U https://youtu.be/jfLAaGtNc7U
    - gambutin 8mo ago
      I get: The uploader has not made this video available in your country :( didn’t know that this was a thing
      - Cieric 8mo ago
        Neither did I, feel free to email me or message me on discord and I can try to download the video and send it to you.
  - andsko 8mo ago
    It's your lucky day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXJfK1wR_w0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXJfK1wR_w0 Buddhism, Out-of-Africa, Talking Dogs | Robert Sapolsky Father-Offspring Interviews #96 Research implies that - no, pets don't have complex understanding of word combinations, beyond the usual commands. But, in terms of recognizing words individually - some of the gifted ones show abilities on par with 18-month-old humans.
pouwerkerk 8mo ago
which came first: the chicken or the egg? language.
- echelon 8mo ago
  Fun joke! Eggs are really old evolutionarily. Over 600 million years old if you count preamniotes. You could still say that's recent on the evolutionary time span, given that life on Earth is ~3.5-3.7 billion years old. (Which is within the same order of magnitude as the age of the universe - which is itself wild to ponder.) Chickens are a human invention. It's fun to think about theropod language centers. Raptor kiki bouba.
throwaway2046 8mo ago
https://archive.ph/QX0Oo https://archive.ph/QX0Oo
phtrivier 8mo ago
So, the next version of Jurassic Park will have a talking velociraptor ? (More honest question: is there enough info in the skeletons / fossils that we have to exclude the possiblity that birds ancestors could modulate sound enough to have "something" like a language, which would have been "lost" after extinction events ?)
- adrianN 8mo ago
  Birds have a language, most mammals do too. Those languages are usually much simpler than ours though.
  - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
    They communicate, but communication is not the same thing as language.
    - nullsanity 8mo ago
      For anyone else whom the above awnsers absolutely nothing without googling what defines the boundary - A more verbose version of the above comment is that they communicate only simple, situational signals (like warning cries or information for action) and not using a symbolic, rule-governed system capable of abstraction, past and future tense, and infinite combination. Of course, with all generalizations, this is sort of a lie, but no - whales, chimps and cephapods don't meet the official bar.
    - Razengan 8mo ago
      Or they communicate in languages we cannot understand. Even among human languages the sounds of some languages sound all the same to humans who are not native speakers of that language. Chinese for example has a million words that all sound like "shi" and other tonal languages like Vietnamese are also indistinguishable to English natives etc. Japanese people treat R/L the same. Elephants and dolphins have been known to assign unique names for each other. Octopuses and other cephalopods communicate by changing the color of their skin, EVEN WITH SOME OTHER FISH! BBC's Blue Planet has an episode where an octopus and a grouper fish coordinate via color to trap prey. Ants and other insects communicate via pheromones and "smell". Are you seriously going to stick to a human-chauvinistic stance that only we have a "language"?
villgax 8mo ago
Are all brains somehow able to visualize spiky waveforms and smooth ones?

89 points by beardyw 8mo ago

c22 8mo ago

Front page two days ago, 62 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105198

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

suddenlybananas 8mo ago

I don't really see how it challenges any theory of language evolution. The bouba kiki effect is hardly necessary nor important for having language.

retsibsi 8mo ago
This is downvoted, perhaps as a 'lazy dismissal'? But I read the SciAm article and I don't think it actually explained this point. The finding seems to be that the bouba-kiki effect is not specific to humans and does not depend on experience. And the previously-existing theory is presented like so: > scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning. The finding is supposed to undermine, or at least challenge, the theory. But why? Is the point just that, if other species also have the bouba-kiki effect but do not have language, the bouba-kiki effect probably doesn't play as important a role as we thought? That seems to be the implication (though the innate/learned distinction also seems to be relevant, and I'm not sure why that is) -- but surely the bouba-kiki effect was never believed to be anything like a sufficient condition for the development of language, was it?
- suddenlybananas 8mo ago
  Yeah I'm not sure why it's being downvoted, I don't dismiss the study at all (I'm the one who originally posted it!). I just think the scientific reporting on it is very odd. It's an interesting study in terms of what it has to say about innate vs learnt associations. >scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning. I suppose just working in linguistics, I find this such a fringe and unserious theory. The hard part of language isn't associating sounds with objects (dogs can do that), it's putting those words together to make novel meanings.
- owyn 8mo ago
  The word "challenge" in the article title is clickbait. I guess the assumption challenged is that this measurable effect is for humans only because we are so special? Good as a headline for a non-science audience that mostly doesn't believe in evolution. It's pretty obvious that our auditory and visual systems are older than humanity as a species. I'd be surprised if the results were anything but confirming. Chickens are not going to learn English. Other species use sound to communicate and that this effect is measurable is pretty cool.
  - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
    But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language. It's a theory that mistakenly thinks that hard problem in language is coming up with words for objects instead of the actually hard problem of combining words in a systematic way.
    - lillesvin 8mo ago
      > But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language. Do you have a source on that? Because I would expect anyone studying sound symbolism to find the bouba-kiki effect extremely important which is probably why it's such a widely cited study, also inside linguistics.
      - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
        It's hard to find a source for that kind of negative statement. Kiki-bouba is important for sound-symbolism definitely! But sound-symbolism is marginal when it comes to language. Iconicity and similar things are very interesting phenomena but they're not the difficult part of language at all and they're not necessary parts of language.
        lillesvin 8mo ago
        I obviously don't know your background but out of the linguists that I know and have met while doing my degrees in linguistics, I don't know of anyone who would say that the kiki-bouba effect is not important — anything, in fact, that challenges the notion that sound-meaning relations are completely arbitrary is interesting because it might give us clues about the origins of language, not to mention that it lends support to other, related hypotheses about sound-symbolism. I'm not sure what you mean by "not necessary parts of language", but I would love to hear what you think the necessary parts of language are. Not to mention, what is "the difficult part of language" then?
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
n4r9 8mo ago
I fonud the following Wikipedia section somewhat useful for understanding the context here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect#Implications_for_understanding_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect#Implications... Annoyingly, very few of the citations are accessible. But the gist as I understand it is that this challenges various proposed explanations for the Bouba-Kiki effect, for example that it relates to human physiology or has a human-specific neurological basis.

hiuioejfjkf 8mo ago

[dead]

bitwize 8mo ago

Maybe it goes to show that animals just have some of the same brain structures associated with language that we do. Parrots are capable of rather sophisticated language use, and the informal word-button experiments suggest that non-avian animals like cats and dogs display some linguistic ability. So the bouba-kiki effect in animals shouldn't be terribly surprising. Certain mammals and birds perhaps may best be thought of as prelinguistic.

Frotag 8mo ago
> the informal word-button experiments suggest that non-avian animals like cats and dogs I always wanted to see long form content on this. Like I'm sure the cherrypicked clips make it look more impressive than reality but I've owned enough pets to believe they can understand more than just individual words / tone.
- Cieric 8mo ago
  Here is a video that I actually just watched recently on that exact thing. https://youtu.be/jfLAaGtNc7U https://youtu.be/jfLAaGtNc7U
  - gambutin 8mo ago
    I get: The uploader has not made this video available in your country :( didn’t know that this was a thing
    - Cieric 8mo ago
      Neither did I, feel free to email me or message me on discord and I can try to download the video and send it to you.
- andsko 8mo ago
  It's your lucky day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXJfK1wR_w0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXJfK1wR_w0 Buddhism, Out-of-Africa, Talking Dogs | Robert Sapolsky Father-Offspring Interviews #96 Research implies that - no, pets don't have complex understanding of word combinations, beyond the usual commands. But, in terms of recognizing words individually - some of the gifted ones show abilities on par with 18-month-old humans.

pouwerkerk 8mo ago

which came first: the chicken or the egg? language.

echelon 8mo ago
Fun joke! Eggs are really old evolutionarily. Over 600 million years old if you count preamniotes. You could still say that's recent on the evolutionary time span, given that life on Earth is ~3.5-3.7 billion years old. (Which is within the same order of magnitude as the age of the universe - which is itself wild to ponder.) Chickens are a human invention. It's fun to think about theropod language centers. Raptor kiki bouba.

throwaway2046 8mo ago

https://archive.ph/QX0Oo https://archive.ph/QX0Oo

phtrivier 8mo ago

So, the next version of Jurassic Park will have a talking velociraptor ? (More honest question: is there enough info in the skeletons / fossils that we have to exclude the possiblity that birds ancestors could modulate sound enough to have "something" like a language, which would have been "lost" after extinction events ?)

adrianN 8mo ago
Birds have a language, most mammals do too. Those languages are usually much simpler than ours though.
- suddenlybananas 8mo ago
  They communicate, but communication is not the same thing as language.
  - nullsanity 8mo ago
    For anyone else whom the above awnsers absolutely nothing without googling what defines the boundary - A more verbose version of the above comment is that they communicate only simple, situational signals (like warning cries or information for action) and not using a symbolic, rule-governed system capable of abstraction, past and future tense, and infinite combination. Of course, with all generalizations, this is sort of a lie, but no - whales, chimps and cephapods don't meet the official bar.
  - Razengan 8mo ago
    Or they communicate in languages we cannot understand. Even among human languages the sounds of some languages sound all the same to humans who are not native speakers of that language. Chinese for example has a million words that all sound like "shi" and other tonal languages like Vietnamese are also indistinguishable to English natives etc. Japanese people treat R/L the same. Elephants and dolphins have been known to assign unique names for each other. Octopuses and other cephalopods communicate by changing the color of their skin, EVEN WITH SOME OTHER FISH! BBC's Blue Planet has an episode where an octopus and a grouper fish coordinate via color to trap prey. Ants and other insects communicate via pheromones and "smell". Are you seriously going to stick to a human-chauvinistic stance that only we have a "language"?

villgax 8mo ago

Are all brains somehow able to visualize spiky waveforms and smooth ones?