科学美国人60秒--让人联想到某种形状的无意义词汇可以说明语言的起源

What Is the Shape of This Word?

What shape do you see when you hear “bouba”? What about “kiki”? It turns out that nonsense words that evoke¹ certain shapes have something to say about the origins of language.

 

Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.

Some words imitate the sounds made by the things they describe, like “buzz” or “hiss” or “zip.” For you language lovers, that’s called onomatopoeia. But what if the the way a word sounds could evoke some other feature of an object, like its shape? Well, a new study suggests not only that it can but that the same word can do so across multiple languages. The findings are in the journal Philosophical² Transactions of the Royal Society B. [Aleksandra ?wiek et al., The bouba/kiki effect is robust³ across cultures and writing systems.]

The researchers were interested in studying the evolution of language ...

Marcus Perlman: Both the ancient origins of language going back hundreds of thousands of years ago or even millions of years ago and also the ongoing⁴ evolution of modern languages.

Hopkin: Marcus Perlman, a lecturer at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. He says that, a century ago, linguists⁵ insisted that the words we assign to various objects and actions are essentially⁶ arbitrary and that words don’t necessarily resemble or sound like the things to which they refer.

Perlman: There’s nothing doggy-sounding about the word dog or feline-sounding about the word cat.

Hopkin: That makes sense because different languages have different words for the same thing. One person’s pup is another one’s perro.

Perlman: But there’s a lot of evidence now suggesting that the arbitrariness doctrine⁷ is proving to be false.

Hopkin: Onomatopoeia is a case in point and so is sign language, which makes frequent use of gestures that resemble their referents, like tracing the tracks of tears as a symbol for crying. To further explore this connection between words and their meanings, Perlman and his colleagues turned to something called the bouba/kiki effect.

Aleksandra Ćwiek: What it is about is that when you see two shapes—one looks like a cloud or like a flower, kind of roundish, and the other one is more spiky⁸, maybe looks more like a star—and when you’re asked to say which one is bouba, you will be more likely to point to a rounded one and, for kiki, to a spiky one.

Hopkin: Aleksandra Ćwiekof the Leibniz-Center General Linguistics⁹ in Berlin. She says that if you were to look at the words bouba and kiki, which are totally made up, one possible explanation for the effect could be the appearance of the letters.

Ćwiek: The shape of b-o-u-b-a, the shapes of those letters kind of evoke the sense of roundness. These letters are round.

Hopkin: But what happens when you don’t see the words but hear them? And does it matter what language the listener speaks?

Ćwiek: So we thought it would be a wonderful idea to just study bouba/kiki across the world.

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

[CLIP: Bouba sound]

Hopkin: Or ...

[CLIP: Kiki sound]

Hopkin: Then they were asked, “Which shape corresponds to the sound?” Whether they were German ...

Valerie Greger: Welche Form gehört zu welchem Klang?[Which shape corresponds to the sound?]

Hopkin: or Spanish ...

Dennise Dalma: ¿Cual figura corresponde al sonido? [Which shape corresponds to the sound?]

Hopkin: Russian ...

Yuri Lazebnik: Для каждого слова которое вы сейчас услышите, укажите с какой из картинок оно у вас ассоциируется? [For each of the words that you are about to hear, indicate with which of the pictures you associate it.]

Hopkin: or Thai ...

Supatchaya Tongtheng: รูปร่างอันไหนสอดคล้องกับเสียงนี้? [Which shape corresponds to the sound?]

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

Perlman: 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.

Hopkin: There were some exceptions. Perlman says that speakers of Romanian, Turkish and Mandarin¹⁰ Chinese were more likely to make the reverse call (although my Turkish friend and her family fell squarely in the classic bouba/kiki camp).

Beria Sunar: That blob looks like a bouba. Kiki has a sharp and spiky sound—like the spiky shape.

Hopkin: 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.

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

Hopkin: So to get the conversation off the ground, they probably tried to come up with sounds that somehow evoked¹¹ the object at hand.

Perlman: 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.

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

?wiek: 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.

Hopkin: ?wiek says she’d like to explore the effects of other nonsense words—ones that use different consonants¹² and vowel¹³ sounds ...

?wiek: 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 ...

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

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

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

1 evoke   

vt.唤起，引起，使人想起

参考例句：

• These images are likely to evoke a strong response in the viewer.这些图像可能会在观众中产生强烈反响。
• Her only resource was the sympathy she could evoke.她以凭借的唯一力量就是她能从人们心底里激起的同情。

2 philosophical   

adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的

参考例句：

• The teacher couldn't answer the philosophical problem.老师不能解答这个哲学问题。
• She is very philosophical about her bad luck.她对自己的不幸看得很开。

3 robust   

adj.强壮的，强健的，粗野的，需要体力的，浓的

参考例句：

• She is too tall and robust.她个子太高，身体太壮。
• China wants to keep growth robust to reduce poverty and avoid job losses,AP commented.美联社评论道，中国希望保持经济强势增长，以减少贫困和失业状况。

4 ongoing   

adj.进行中的，前进的

参考例句：

• The problem is ongoing.这个问题尚未解决。
• The issues raised in the report relate directly to Age Concern's ongoing work in this area.报告中提出的问题与“关心老人”组织在这方面正在做的工作有直接的关系。

5 linguists   

n.通晓数国语言的人( linguist的名词复数 )；语言学家

参考例句：

• The linguists went to study tribal languages in the field. 语言学家们去实地研究部落语言了。 来自辞典例句
• The linguists' main interest has been to analyze and describe languages. 语言学家的主要兴趣一直在于分析并描述语言。 来自辞典例句

6 essentially   

adv.本质上，实质上，基本上

参考例句：

• Really great men are essentially modest.真正的伟人大都很谦虚。
• She is an essentially selfish person.她本质上是个自私自利的人。

7 doctrine   

n.教义；主义；学说

参考例句：

• He was impelled to proclaim his doctrine.他不得不宣扬他的教义。
• The council met to consider changes to doctrine.宗教议会开会考虑更改教义。

8 spiky   

adj.长而尖的，大钉似的

参考例句：

• Your hairbrush is too spiky for me.你的发刷，我觉得太尖了。
• The spiky handwriting on the airmail envelope from London was obviously hers.发自伦敦的航空信封上的尖长字迹分明是她的。

9 linguistics   

n.语言学

参考例句：

• She plans to take a course in applied linguistics.她打算学习应用语言学课程。
• Linguistics is a scientific study of the property of language.语言学是指对语言的性质所作的系统研究。

10 Mandarin   

n.中国官话，国语，满清官吏；adj.华丽辞藻的

参考例句：

• Just over one billion people speak Mandarin as their native tongue.大约有十亿以上的人口以华语为母语。
• Mandarin will be the new official language of the European Union.普通话会变成欧盟新的官方语言。

11 evoked   

[医]诱发的

参考例句：

• The music evoked memories of her youth. 这乐曲勾起了她对青年时代的回忆。
• Her face, though sad, still evoked a feeling of serenity. 她的脸色虽然悲伤，但仍使人感觉安详。

12 consonants   

n.辅音，子音( consonant的名词复数 )；辅音字母

参考例句：

• Consonants are frequently assimilated to neighboring consonants. 辅音往往被其邻近的辅音同化。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Vowels possess greater sonority than consonants. 元音比辅音响亮。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

13 vowel   

n.元音；元音字母

参考例句：

• A long vowel is a long sound as in the word"shoe ".长元音即如“shoe” 一词中的长音。
• The vowel in words like 'my' and 'thigh' is not very difficult.单词my和thigh中的元音并不难发。