@johncarlosbaez

I’m calling BS on this one, even without reading the paper.

If you want to know why, search Google for Clever Hans.

I spent my PhD years studying honeybee behaviour. Animal experiments are very often biased by the human experimenter in unconscious ways.

It just seems too far fetched for me: An cognitive effect in humans innately manifest in baby chicks? I doubt it.

Having said all that, I should read the paper and try to pinpoint specific weaknesses. But I’m busy and lazy.

@TonyVladusich - it's not supposed to be a linguistic effect, but rather a sonic effect: a correlation between sounds and shapes. We certainly know what sounds "wet" and animals should too. We also know what sounds "raspy and sharp", and what sounds "bouncy and rounded".

But yes: a skeptic should carefully study and question these findings with a careful comb.

@johncarlosbaez

How is that not linguistic? Sounds and shapes are cognitive constructs not physical ones!

@TonyVladusich - They are cognitive constructs, yes, but not necessarily linguistic. Animals have associations to sounds and shapes without having language. They *need* to have some such associations to survive - e.g. hearing dripping sounds, they think of water.

The correlations between sound and shape ultimately arises from physics: e.g., liquids make dripping sounds, pounding on a rounded elastic suface tends to make a "bouba" type sound, etc.

@maxpool

@TonyVladusich - but you are starting to make me doubt that chicks can make the bouba-kiki distinction. One proposed explanation for it is that when humans say "bouba" our mouths make a more rounded shape than for "kiki". This would be a physical explanation, but quite specific to human vocal productions, not something a bird should know about. I switched to the example of the sound of running water, since that's something a bird should maybe know about!

@maxpool

@johncarlosbaez @maxpool

These are newborn chicks. They know nothing. And the idea that they are born innately able to associate specific sounds to specific shapes is quite frankly laughable. See, for example, the entire history of animal behavioural studies.

@TonyVladusich - okay, now you're saying stuff that I can understand. I don't know what newborn chicks can or can't do, since I've never read about newborn birds' innate abilities. But someone would know about this... maybe you.

The pop article says

"The team then repeated the experiment with chicks that were less than a day old, although this time without any training or rewards. As in the first experiment, they explored the spiky shape when hearing kiki and a round shape when hearing bouba.

The researchers chose chicks as their experimental model because they are precocial. This means they are relatively mature and mobile not long after hatching, and have had limited opportunities to learn sound and shape associations from the outside world.

The team believes that because birds and mammals are distantly related (sharing a common ancestor around 300 million years ago), the bouba-kiki effect is not just a quirk of our language. Instead, it could be an ancient organizing principle of the brain that helps animals navigate the world, as the team notes in their paper: "Our data place the origin of sound-shape crossmodal matching [the ability of the brain to link information from different senses] at the earliest stages of life, possibly hinting at a predisposed experience-independent mechanism.""

This may or may not be nonsense - I don't know.

@maxpool