What Dogs’ Bouba-and-Kiki Responses May Tell Us

What is the Bouba-Kiki effect?

The Bouba-Kiki effect is a tendency to connect some speech sounds with particular shapes. In the familiar example, people often match “bouba” with a rounded shape and “kiki” with a spiky one, even though both are made-up words ¹³.

The research is about an association, not a dictionary meaning. “Bouba” does not literally mean round, and “kiki” does not literally mean spiky. The question is whether a sound can seem to fit a shape even when there is no learned definition.

What did researchers test in dogs?

A research team led by animal behaviorist Eleonora Biffi tested adult domestic dogs in two experiments. The paper, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is titled “Hearing shapes: the Bouba-Kiki effect in adult domestic dogs” ¹².

In the first experiment, 51 dogs took part with their owners. The setup had a screen and speaker on each side of a room. The dogs saw shapes and heard a person say either “Bouba” or “Kiki” as the screen-and-speaker combinations changed ¹.

The research report describes the study as evidence that dogs show the Bouba-Kiki effect ². The supplied source excerpts do not give enough detail about the full procedure or results to describe every test or put a precise size on the effect.

What might the dogs’ responses mean?

The result suggests that dogs can match a sound pattern with a visual shape in a way that resembles the familiar human association. That is useful evidence about perception: animals may connect information from different senses without relying on a word’s learned meaning.

The paper notes that young chicks have also been reported to associate round and spiky shapes with “Bouba” and “Kiki.” The authors present this as a reason to consider whether the effect is a broader cross-sensory correspondence, rather than something limited to language ². Cross-sensory means involving more than one sense, such as hearing and seeing.

This does not prove that dogs think of shapes exactly as people do, or that they understand these sounds as words. A matching response in an experiment shows an association; it does not, by itself, reveal what a dog experiences internally.

Does the study show that all dogs make these matches?

No. The study recruited 70 domestic dogs across two experiments, and the first involved 51 dogs ¹. Those numbers describe the participants, not every dog or every breed. The available sources do not say enough about the sample to judge how representative it was.

The experiment also took place in a prepared room with screens, speakers, shapes and spoken sounds. The sources do not establish whether the same associations guide dogs’ everyday choices or communication. The result is best treated as evidence from a specific research setting, not a general rule about every dog.

What remains unknown about dogs and sound?

The study raises a question about how the association works. The available material does not show whether dogs respond to particular features of the sounds, such as how they are pronounced, or to some other aspect of the test.

It also leaves open how stable the effect is across dogs and situations, and whether experience changes it. Further research would be needed to explain the mechanism and establish how far the finding applies. For now, the careful conclusion is that dogs showed evidence of a sound-shape association in an experiment—not that they share human language or meanings.