Decoding the ''bouba-kiki'' effect in early visual cortex
Ioannucci, S.; Jordan, C.; Carnet, A.-S.; McGettigan, C.; Vetter, P.
Show 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.
Matching journals
The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Predictive Neural Computations Support Spoken Word Recognition: Evidence from MEG and Competitor Priming 96%
- Metamodal Coupling of Vibrotactile and Auditory Speech Processing Systems Through Matched Stimulus Representations 96%
- Linguistic structure and meaning organize neural oscillations into a content-specific hierarchy 96%
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- The human language system, including its inferior frontal component in 'Broca's area', does not support music perception 97%
- Context Free and Context-Dependent Conceptual Representation in the Brain 96%
- Naturalistic audio-movies reveal common spatial organization across "visual" cortices of different blind individuals 96%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.