An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Why does "bouba" sound round and "kiki" sound spiky? This intuition that ties certain sounds to shapes is oddly reliable all over the world, and for at least a century, scientists have considered it a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning. But now a new study adds an unexpected twist: baby chickens make these same sound-shape connections, suggesting that the link to human language may not be so unique. The results, published today in Science, challenge a long-standing theory about the so-called bouba-kiki effect: that it might explain how humans first tethered meaning to sound to create language. Perhaps, the thinking goes, people just naturally agree on certain associations between shapes and sounds because of some innate feature of our brain or our world. But if the barnyard hen also agrees with such associations, you might wonder if we've been pecking at the wrong linguistic seed.

Maria Loconsole, a comparative psychologist at the University of Padua in Italy, and her colleagues decided to investigate the bouba-kiki effect in baby chicks because the birds could be tested almost immediately after hatching, before their brain would be influenced by exposure to the world. The researchers placed chicks in front of two panels: one featured a flowerlike shape with gently rounded curves; the other had a spiky blotch reminiscent of a cartoon explosion. They then played recordings of humans saying either "bouba" or "kiki" and observed the birds' behavior. When the chicks heard "bouba," 80 percent of them approached the round shape first and spent an average of more than three minutes exploring it compared with an average of just under one minute spent exploring the spiky shape. The exploration preferences were flipped when the chicks heard "kiki."

Because the tests took place within the chicks' carefully supervised first hours of life outside their eggshell, this association between particular sounds and shapes couldn't have been learned from experience. Instead it may be evidence of an innate perceptual bias that goes back way farther in our evolutionary history than previously believed. "We parted with birds on the evolutionary line 300 million years ago," says Aleksandra Cwiek, a linguist at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toru, Poland, who was not involved in the study. "It's just mind-blowing."

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