Decoding the “bouba-kiki” effect in early visual cortex

Abstract The “bouba-kiki” effect, or sound symbolism, is the non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and visual shapes, in which words like “bouba” are consistently associated with round shapes, and “kiki” with spiky shapes. Despite robust behavioral evidence for sound symbolic associations, it is still unclear whether they are a linguistic epiphenomenon or manifest themselves as distinct sensory representations in the human brain. Using fMRI and multivariate pattern analyses, we show that, in the absence of visual input, round and spiky sound symbolic words elicit distinct neural representations, not only in auditory and speech processing regions, but also in parietal and even early visual cortex including V1. These neural representations correlate with behavioural shape judgements of sound-symbolic words, as revealed by representational similarity analyses. Our findings suggest a potential functional mechanism for sound symbolism: phonological features of sound symbolic words are represented in auditory and speech processing regions and linked to cross-modal shape representations in parietal and early visual regions, which in turn lead to sound symbolic perceptual judgements. Thus, our results provide evidence for a neural mechanism underlying the “bouba-kiki” effect in the human brain.