Shaking Takete and Flowing Maluma. Non-Sense Words Are Associated with Motion Patterns.

ABSTRACT: People assign the artificial words takete and kiki to spiky, angular figures and the artificial words maluma and bouba to rounded figures. We examined whether such a cross-modal correspondence could also be found for human body motion. We transferred the body movements of speakers onto two-dimensional coordinates and created animated stick-figures based on this data. Then we invited people to judge these stimuli using the words takete-maluma, bouba-kiki, and several verbal descriptors that served as measures of angularity/smoothness. In addition to this we extracted the quantity of motion, the velocity of motion and the average angle between motion vectors from the coordinate data. Judgments of takete (and kiki) were related to verbal descriptors of angularity, a high quantity of motion, h

SUBMITTER: Koppensteiner M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4777495 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature