Shaking Takete and Flowing Maluma. Non-Sense Words Are Associated with Motion Patterns

PLoS One. 2016 Mar 3;11(3):e0150610. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0150610. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

People assign the artificial words takete and kiki to spiky, angular figures and the artificial words maluma and bouba to rounded figures. We examined whether such a cross-modal correspondence could also be found for human body motion. We transferred the body movements of speakers onto two-dimensional coordinates and created animated stick-figures based on this data. Then we invited people to judge these stimuli using the words takete-maluma, bouba-kiki, and several verbal descriptors that served as measures of angularity/smoothness. In addition to this we extracted the quantity of motion, the velocity of motion and the average angle between motion vectors from the coordinate data. Judgments of takete (and kiki) were related to verbal descriptors of angularity, a high quantity of motion, high velocity and sharper angles. Judgments of maluma (or bouba) were related to smooth movements, a low velocity, a lower quantity of motion and blunter angles. A forced-choice experiment during which we presented subsets with low and high rankers on our motion measures revealed that people preferably assigned stimuli displaying fast movements with sharp angles in motion vectors to takete and stimuli displaying slow movements with blunter angles in motion vectors to maluma. Results indicated that body movements share features with information inherent in words such as takete and maluma and that people perceive the body movements of speakers on the level of changes in motion direction (e.g., body moves to the left and then back to the right). Follow-up studies are needed to clarify whether impressions of angularity and smoothness have similar communicative values across different modalities and how this affects social judgments and person perception.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Arm / physiology
  • Behavior / physiology
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Language
  • Male
  • Motion*
  • Musculoskeletal Physiological Phenomena*
  • Musculoskeletal System*
  • Speech Perception / physiology*

Grants and funding

The work was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF; grant number P 25262-G16), www.fwf.ac.at. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.