Newborn Chicks Connect Sounds With Shapes Just Like Humans, Study Finds (scientificamerican.com) 16
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."
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."
Eating chicken (Score:4, Informative)
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Are you eating baby chicks?
Those chicken nuggets gotta come from somewhere.
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what we do to baby chicks today is... something else.
To be fair, getting tossed into a shredder probably results in a quicker death than this. [reddit.com] Still, what makes the factory disposal process seem more horrific is the scale and the fact that we're detached from it.
At any rate, it's not enough to put me off eating chicken. Chicken is delicious.
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Sexing chicks is because roosters generally are terrible chickens in general - you can't have too many or they start to hurt each other so they become harder to raise if you want broiler chickens. And hens are generally useful because they lay eggs so you can decide if you want them as broiler or egg layers.
The shredder is basically the most humane way of getting rid of the unwanted roosters - it's instant death basically. They're also sexed as early as possible which is why the more experienced folks can d
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OK, if you don't want to kill the male chicks, turn them into capons [wikipedia.org]. The meat is said to be delicious and it lets the males live longer.
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The likely reason looks obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Spiky shapes generate higher frequencies than rounded ones.
If the chicks were exposed to any sound and visual info before the test then one would expect this result. They may have learned the correlation between higher frequencies and spiky shapes even during the test. I think there is a tiny chance the correlation may be genetically "pre-wired" in brain.
Thread title is sexist! (Score:2)
Chicks are people too! but call them ladies because some of them don't like "chick", "dame" or "broad". Or anything else dudes call them.
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Or a convergence? (Score:2)
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."
What if bouba and kiki just sound similar to things in reality? bouba sounds like flowing water, which happens to have round curvy portions, including bubbles (named in English with a similar sound). kiki sounds close to crystalline structures breaking; glass, ice, etc. This results in sharp angles. Instinctively knowing that "bouba" type sounds might indicate water is useful to all life with ears. Knowing that "kiki" means "sharp" seems more useful for staying away from things though.
more evidence (Score:3)
More evidence that the population is composed largely of bird-brains.