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... Does "bouba" sound round to you? How about "maluma"? Neither are real words, but we've known for decades that people who hear them tend to associate them with round objects. There have been plenty of ideas put forward about why that would be the case, and most of them have turned out to be wrong. Now, in perhaps the weirdest bit of evidence to date, researchers have found that even newly hatched chickens seem to associate "bouba" with round shapes.

The initial finding dates all the way back to 1947, when someone discovered that people associated some word-like sounds with rounded shapes, and others with spiky ones. ...

A team of Italian researchers"Maria Loconsole, Silvia Benavides-Varela, and Lucia Regolin"now have evidence that that isn't true either. They decided to look for the bouba/kiki effect well beyond primates, instead turning to newly hatched chickens, only one or three days old. That may sound a bit odd, but chickens have a key advantage beyond ready availability: unlike a 4-month-old human, newly hatched chicks are fully mobile and able to interact with the world.

Control experiments using silence or classical music showed that the young chicks are somewhat drawn to a rounded shape. But recordings of a person saying "bouba" caused 80 percent of the chicks to move to a rounded shape first. If a recording of "kiki" was played instead, that number dropped to just 25 percent, with the numbers going to a spiky shape rising. The effect is somewhat stronger in 3-day-old chicks, but it still showed up in the animals that were tested just one day after hatching. ...