Sound Symbolism in a Reaction Time Task: Is the Bouba-Kiki Effect an implicit process?

This project is investigating a specific case of sound symbolism, the Bouba-Kiki effect – the tendency for people to associate certain sounds with sharp or round visual shapes (Uznadze, 1924; Köhler, 1929; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). There are methodological limitations associated with the forced-choice task typically used to test the effect – the task likely reflects participants’ explicit, conscious intuitions about sound symbolism rather than the real-time mechanisms underlying the phenomenon (Westbury et al., 2018; Kovic et al., 2010). Therefore, the authors are interested in studying whether the Bouba-Kiki effect is an implicit process by testing whether sound-shape congruency modulates Reaction Time (RT). We predict that, if sound symbolism is an implicit process, we would observe faster RTs to congruent/matching sound-shape pairs (for example, trials where ‘bububu’ is followed by a round shape), as opposed to incongruent/mismatching sound-shape pairs (such as ‘bububu’ followed by a spiky shape). Our secondary analyses will investigate whether combining consonants and vowels of opposing qualities (round vs. spiky) in one word would lead to slower RTs. This is a randomized experiment that is planned to collect data from a poll of participants on Prolific ™. The analyses will be performed primarily by the first author, Polina Rafailova, who has not worked with the data or seen it prior to analyses.