21: What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles (Patreon)

Most of the time, a word is an arbitrary label: there’s no particular  reason why a cat has to be associated with the particular string of  sounds in the word “cat”, and indeed other languages have different  words for the same animal. But sometimes it may not be so arbitrary.  Take these two shapes: a sharp, spiky 🗯 and a soft, rounded 💭 and  these two names: “bouba” and “kiki”. If you had to assign one name to  each shape, which would you pick? 

(Here’s a pause to let you think about it.) 

If  you said that the spiky shape was kiki and the round shape was bouba,  you’re like 90% of English speakers who answer this question. But does  this work the same way for speakers of other languages? What about  languages that don’t have a /b/ or a /k/ sound, or that have other  features, like tone? 

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your host  Lauren Gawne talks with guest linguist Dr Suzy Styles about how language  interacts with your other senses like vision and touch, and doing  research across different cultures and languages. Suzy is an Assistant  Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and runs the  BLIP (Brain Language Intersensory Processing) lab.

We  also announced two new Patreon funding goals, the first ($2,000) is to  film our first video episode, taking a look at gesture. The second  ($2,500) is to film at least one video interview discussing signed  languages with a deaf linguist. We’re excited by the possibility of  making these video episodes about linguistic topics that are a bit hard  to convey in audio-only form!

To see this episode's shownotes, go to: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/175127434871/lingthusiasm-episode-21-what-words-sound-spiky