The word "challenge" in the article title is clickbait. I guess the assumption challenged is that this measurable effect is for humans only because we are so special? Good as a headline for a non-science audience that mostly doesn't believe in evolution. It's pretty obvious that our auditory and visual systems are older than humanity as a species. I'd be surprised if the results were anything but confirming. Chickens are not going to learn English. Other species use sound to communicate and that this effect is measurable is pretty cool.

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suddenlybananas 2 hours ago | parent [-]

But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language. It's a theory that mistakenly thinks that hard problem in language is coming up with words for objects instead of the actually hard problem of combining words in a systematic way.

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lillesvin an hour ago | parent [-]

> But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language.

Do you have a source on that? Because I would expect anyone studying sound symbolism to find the bouba-kiki effect extremely important which is probably why it's such a widely cited study, also inside linguistics.

	▲	suddenlybananas an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's hard to find a source for that kind of negative statement. Kiki-bouba is important for sound-symbolism definitely! But sound-symbolism is marginal when it comes to language. Iconicity and similar things are very interesting phenomena but they're not the difficult part of language at all and they're not necessary parts of language.