The affective character of abstract shapes

This work explores the Takete/Maluma and Bouba/Kiki crossmodal correspondence. The phenomenon involves presenting participants with two abstract shapes – one characterised as curvy/roundish, and the other as angular/pointy – and two sets of meaningless words/sounds, one characterised by rounded vowels or a ‘smooth’ sound, the other by unrounded vowels or a ‘sharp’ sound. Participants tend to associate the curvy shape with the rounded vowel/smooth sounding non-word, while linking the angular shape to the unrounded vowel/sharp sounding non-word. The phenomenon is quite intriguing as it is a showcase for structural commonalities among perceptions deriving from different sensory channels. Nevertheless, there are concerns regarding the methodology used to define it. Specifically, what happens if people are given more choices in terms of shapes and non-words, will the reported correspondences hold under these expanded conditions? Additionally, the study seeks to verify whether abstract shapes possess other tertiary qualities, such as an ‘affective personality’. The study was conducted by means of an online experiment involving 122 native Italian speakers. Participants were presented with 9 abstract shapes and 10 non-words: three characterised as sharp sounding (takete, kiki, and tidi), three as soft sounding (maluma, bouba, and puloma), two as mixed sounding (kalute and bouki), and two which sounds may remotely recall the name of the shapes (tigano for triangolo-triangle and kiquoda for quadrato-square). Each shape was presented singularly, and participants were asked first to choose a name for the shape among the non-words and then to select an affective characteristic that best described each shape from the following list of options: good, bad, angry, sad, scared, joyful, calm, pleasant, bored, and melancholic. Results show strong convergences among participants in assigning affective characteristics to the abstract shapes. However, it should be noticed that only certain abstract shapes show a consistent correspondence with specific non-words.