A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC BEHAVIOURAL STUDY INTO THE PHONOSEMANTIC FEATURES OF THE RUSSIAN AND MONGOLIAN LANGUAGES:THE BOUBA/KIKI EFFECT
This article presents the results of a psycholinguistic behavioural study of the bouba/kiki effect in native speakers of Russian and Mongolian. The research is based on the hypothesis that there is a correlation between the phonological component of pseudowords and the shape of the objects they designate as a form of non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. This correlation is expected to influence the recognition time for pseudowords in a visual test: e.g., a rounded shape is more likely to be called bouba than kiki, while the reaction time to the multimodal stimulus “rounded shape and pseudoword bouba” should be less than to the pair “rounded shape and pseudoword kiki”. Our experiment involved 124 subjects (60 Russian and 64 Mongolian native speakers), who were fluent only in their native language. To study visual recognition of words and pseudowords depending on the conditions for their presentation, two interrelated psycholinguistic techniques were applied: associative experiment (using round and angular forms as stimuli) and implicit association test for classifying verbal and nonverbal stimuli in order to identify semantic effects in word recognition and phonosemantic effects in pseudoword recognition. The psycholinguistic experiment showed a significant effect produced on reaction time to pseudowords in Russian and Mongolian subjects by the combination of the “stimulus type” (according to the phonosemantic features of sounds) and “stimulus condition” (congruency effect) factors; the other effects had minor significance. Presumably, this can be explained by rather complex and so far unrevealed mechanisms of cognitive processing of pseudowords. These effects are still undergoing rigorous verification in experimental studies using mental chronometry, EEG, fMRI and eyetracking.