Introducing the brain: innate response to sounds (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, May 28, 2024, 15:41 (177 days ago) @ David Turell

In early childhood:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQVwnWSGBbkbRdkQtslpLSkzWpp

"One fascinating aspect of human language is the way we ascribe shapes to sounds. This sound symbolism is often called the Bouba-Kiki effect after two made-up words people across cultures associate with round and sharp objects, respectively. The effect has been found in infants as young as four months old, begging the question of whether it stems from an innate perceptual mechanism. However, even four-month-old children have had lots of exposure to language, so it’s possible they’ve already learned sound symbolism through experience.

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"Three-day-old chicks, on the other hand, are much more precocious. If they exhibit sound symbolism, that would be a strong indicator that the phenomenon is innate rather than learned.

"So, researchers taught 42 chicks to circle around a panel to get a tasty treat. Then, they presented them with two such panels: one had a spiky shape on it, the other a round one. Lo and behold, the chicks preferred the spiky shape when the researchers said “Kiki” and the round one when they said “Bouba,” researchers report in a 17 May bioRxiv preprint. “Even though our subjects had never experienced the sound-symbolic matching prior to test, they still spontaneously associated the two dimensions of shape and sound,” the team writes. This places “the developmental origin of sound-symbolism … at the earliest stages of life, possibly hinting at a predisposed experience-independent mechanism.”

"Not only do the findings suggest this effect is essentially innate, they indicate that it’s not special to our brains. “Crucially, direct evidence in an animal model suggests that, rather than being a culturally learned phenomenon unique to humans, sound-symbolism may belong to a set of predisposed associations built into different species,” the team writes."

Comment: if all animals can make sounds their brains should have a system to receive them with some initial degree of understanding. Why should one develop without the other? A designer would certainly work this way.