Is this not reducible to whether a speech sound contains fricatives and stops or not? They produce spiky sounds

But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes, though surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in frequency?

I'd be interested on results of shapes imagined when you take the source as musical or other non speech sounds.

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canjobear 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes, though surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in frequency?

Sure, but it's a very abstract connection between objects being sharp in vision and frequencies changing sharply in hearing. There's no guarantee any given organism would make the connection.

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fzeindl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In the book „the design of everyday things“ it is mentioned that „natural mappings“ exist. Moving the knob of a vertical slider to the upper end universally means „brighter“ or „louder“, not „less bright“ or „more silent“.

	▲	IsTom 15 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Moving the knob of a vertical slider to the upper end universally means „brighter“ or „louder“, not „less bright“ or „more silent“. Except for the organ drawbars?
	▲	5- 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		maybe the chicks and norman get it, but i'm currently renting an apartment in france that has a bunch of these light switches installed all upside down, with "-" at the top: https://www.legrand.com.gh/en/catalog/products/arteor-push-b...

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oasisaimlessly 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think it's abstract at all. Rub something sharp (anything from a stick to a phonograph needle) on an object and you'll directly transcribe its spatial frequency spectrum into an audio frequency spectrum.

	▲	canjobear 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Do you think it's obvious that a chick would understand that connection?

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selridge 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes

I think the why just got a lot tricker than we imagined. Because we failed to replicate this experiment on other primates, we couldn't avoid a semantic suspicion about those associations. Now we probably have to set semantics aside or let it get a lot weirder, because we can replicate across ~300My.

>surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in frequency?

Maybe, and I think "multi-sensory signal processing" is the best framing, but the representation could also carry harder to think about things like "harm".

It's also super cool because the bouba-kiki effect framing was chosen due to methodological convenience for linguists and cultural anthropologists and their experimental bounds, not neuroscientists or signal processing folks. We could potentially find other experiments quickly, since chicks are a model organism and the mechanism is clear.

Things could move fast here.