这个单词的形状是什么?(下)

With the help of 22 different collaborators, the researchers tested the bouba/kiki effect in 25 different languages from Albanian and Armenian all the way to Zulu—with Farsi, French and Finnish in between.

在22个不同合作者的帮助下，研究人员用25种不同的语言测试了bouba/kiki效应，从阿尔巴尼亚语、亚美尼亚语一直到祖鲁语，其中还包括波斯语、法语和芬兰语。

Participants were told to look at the two shapes and then listen to the sound: either bouba or kiki.

实验者被要求看着这两个形状，然后听声音:bouba或kiki。

Then they were asked, “Which shape corresponds to the sound?”

然后他们被问到:“哪种形状对应的声音?”

Whether they were German?

无论它们是德语？

Or Spanish?

还是西班牙语？

Russian?

俄罗斯语？

Or Thai?

还是泰语？

Most participants said the rounder shape was bouba and the pointy one was kiki.

大多数实验者表示，圆点的是bouba，尖点的是kiki。

This suggests that the effect is legit and does seem to be driven by some widely observed correspondence between the spoken words and the visual features of the shapes.

这表明，这种效应是合理的，而且似乎确实受到了一些被广泛观察到的口语和形状视觉特征之间的对应关系的驱动。

There were some exceptions.

也有一些例外。

Perlman says that speakers of Romanian, Turkish and Mandarin Chinese were more likely to make the reverse call (although my Turkish friend and her family fell squarely in the classic bouba/kiki camp).

帕尔曼表示，说罗马尼亚语、土耳其语和汉语普通话的人更有可能做出相反的决定(尽管我的土耳其朋友和她的家人完全属于典型的bouba/kiki阵营)。

As to what that could mean about the evolution of language: imagine our early ancestors when they started using spoken words to refer to things.

至于这对语言的进化意味着什么:想象一下我们的早期祖先开始使用口语来指代事物。

They couldn’t say, “Listen, my friend, now we’re gonna call this new object a table.”

他们不可能说，“听着，朋友，我们要把这个新对象称为桌子。”

So to get the conversation off the ground, they probably tried to come up with sounds that somehow evoked the object at hand.

因此，为了让对话开始，他们可能会试图用某种方式唤起手边物体的声音。

As a general principle, it might be that new words that are heard to resemble their referents in some way or another would have been more likely to be understood and adopted by a wider community of speakers.

作为一个普遍原则，可能是新单词在某些方面与所指物相似，更有可能被更广泛的说话者群体理解和采用。

So if folks from far-flung cultures generally agree that bouba is bulbous while kiki is sharp ...

所以，如果来自不同文化背景的人普遍认为bouba是圆的，而kiki是尖的……

It shows us the potential of those correspondences to be to have been relevant at the very dawn of language—that, in fact, our ancestors could have relied upon those when establishing the first word forms.

它向我们展示了这些联系在语言出现之初就存在的潜力——事实上，我们的祖先在建立第一个单词形式时可能就依赖于这些联系。

Cwiek says she’d like to explore the effects of other nonsense words—ones that use different consonants and vowel sounds ...

克维克表示，她想探索其他无意义单词的效应——那些使用不同辅音和元音的单词……

But also testing real vocabularies of languages across these possible dimensions that evoke the sense of roundness or sharpness or maybe other sensations in us because that might bring us closer to how the first words came to be ...

但也要在这些可能的维度上测试真正的语言词汇，这些词汇会唤起我们对圆的、对尖的感觉或其他感觉，因为这可能会让我们更接近最初的单词是如何产生的……

Which means that bouba and kiki will not be the last word.

这意味着bouba和kiki不会是最后的定论。

Special thanks to my friends: Valerie Greger, Dennise Dalma, Yuri Lazebnik, Supatchaya Tongtheng and Beria Sunar.

特别感谢我的朋友们：瓦莱丽·格雷格、丹尼斯·达尔玛、尤里·拉兹布尼克、苏帕卡娅·汤曾和贝里亚·苏纳尔。

For Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Karen Hopkin.

科学美国人——60秒科学。我是凯伦·霍普金。