The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky Page A

vowels toward the front when using baby talk, and psychologist Anne Fernald shows that, across languages, talk to babies tends to have high pitch.
    The frequency code isn’t the only kind of sound symbolism in food. To see why, we’ll need a brief digression. Consider these two pictures:

    Suppose I told you that in the Martian language one of these two was called bouba and the other was called kiki and you had to guess which was which. Think for a second. Which picture is bouba? Which kiki? How about maluma versus takete?
    If you’re like most people, you called the jagged picture on the left kiki (or takete ) and the round one on the right bouba (or maluma ). This test was invented by German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, in 1929. Linguists and psychologists have repeated this experiment using all sorts of made-up words with sounds like bouba and kiki, and no matter what language they study, from Swedish to Swahili to a remote nomadic population of northern Namibia, and even in toddlers two and a half years old, the results are astonishingly consistent. There seems to be something about jagged shapes that makes people call them kiki and rounder curvy shapes that is somehow naturally bouba .
    The link to food comes from the lab of Oxford psychologist Charles Spence, one of the world’s foremost researchers in sensory perception. In a number of recent papers, Spence and his colleagues have studied the link between the taste of different foods, the curved and jagged pictures, and words like maluma/takete .
    In one paper, for example, Spence, Mary Kim Ngo, and Reeva Misraasked people to eat a piece of chocolate and say whether the taste better matched the words maluma or takete . People eating milk chocolate (Lindt extra creamy 30 percent cocoa) said the taste fit the word maluma (and also matched the curvier figure). People eating dark chocolate (Lindt 70 percent and 90 percent cocoa) instead chose the word takete (and matched the jagged figure). In another paper they found similar results for carbonation; carbonated water was perceived as more “kiki” (and spiky) and still water was perceived as more “bouba” (and curvy). In other words, words with m and l sounds like maluma were associated with creamier or gentler tastes and words with t and k sounds like takete were associated with bitter or carbonated tastes.
    These associations are very similar to what I also found with consonants in ice cream and cracker names. I found that l and m occurred more often in ice cream names, while t and d occurred more often in cracker names.
    So what is it about bouba and maluma that people associate with visual images of round and curvy, or tastes of creamy and smooth, while kiki and takete are associated with jagged visual images and sharp, bitter, and sour tastes? Recent work by a number of linguists studied exactly which sounds seem to be causing the effects.
    One reasonable proposal for what’s going on has to do with continuity and smoothness. Sounds like m, l, and r, called continuants because they are continuous and smooth acoustically (the sound is pretty consistent across its whole length), are more closely associated with smoother figures. By contrast, strident sounds that abruptly start and stop, like t and k, are associated with the spiky figures. The consonant t has the most distinct jagged burst of energy of any consonant in English.
    To help you visualize this, look at the display on the following page of the sound waves from a recording that I made of myself saying “maluma” followed by “takete.” Note the relatively smooth wave for maluma, which has a relatively smooth flow of air. By contrast, the three sharp discontinuities in takete on the right occurred when I said the sounds t and k; for each of these consonants, the airflow is briefly blocked by the tongue in the mouth, and then a little burst of air explodes out.

The waveform (sound waves) of me saying