Whether you speak English, French, Japanese or even Zulu, it seems all of us understand a secret universal language.
A new study has found that people match certain sounds we hear to certain shapes that we see – regardless of where we’re from.
To find out if you’re one of them, you can take the official test below.
Firstly, take a good look at the two lines in the image – the one at the top is jagged , while the other below is flat.
Next, listen to the video, which will present you with two audio samples.
The one labelled ‘Audio sample A’ consists of someone making an ‘L’ sound, while ‘Audio sample B’ features a rolled or trilled ‘R’ sound.
All you have to do is match up the shape that you think best fits the sound.
According to the study, people around the world overwhelmingly associate the jagged shape with the R sound, while the flat shape is associated with the L sound.
Scientists say that people match certain sounds that we hear to certain shapes that we see – regardless of what country we’re from. The experts showed people a jagged line (top) and a flat line (bottom) before playing them recordings of brief sounds
Whether you speak English, French, Japanese or even Zulu, it seems all of us understand a secret universal language (stock image)
This so-called ‘R/L effect’ has been tested for the first time by a team led by Marcus Perlman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Birmingham.
He says different sounds literally ‘have texture and shape to them’ – as evidenced in spectrograms and oscillograms featuring rough or smooth lines.
‘This could be due to a kind of iconicity – a resemblance between the sound of the word and the texture to which it refers,’ Professor Perlman said.
For the study, Professor Perlman and his international colleagues worked with a total of 1,030 adult participants who collectively spoke 28 different languages.
These were English, French, Greek, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, Albanian, Romanian, Portuguese, Armenian, Turkish, Georgian, Polish, Estonian, Hungarian, Daakie, Palikúr, Farsi, Zulu and Tashlhiyt Berber, a language native to Morocco.
First, participants were presented with images of the two lines – one jagged and one straight – and were asked to imagine running their fingers along each.
They were then played the recording of someone producing the trilled R-sound followed by the L-sound before matching each sound to one of the lines.
In total, 912 out of the 1,030 participants (88.5 per cent) matched R with the jagged line and L with the straight line.
Study author Marcus Perlman thinks speech sounds ‘have texture and shape’ to them. Pictured, oscillograms and spectrograms for the recording of the ‘R’ sound
Pictured, oscillograms and spectrograms for the recording of the ‘L’ sound. Note the smoother lines – a match for the smoother sound of L
Speakers of languages including Estonian and Finnish had the highest match rate of 100 per cent, while the lowest (70 per cent) was for speakers of languages including Albanian and Mandarin Chinese
The bouba-kiki effect
The bouba-kiki effect is the association of made-up words ‘bouba’ with a round shape and ‘kiki’ with a spiky shape.
This association shows a correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties.
Researchers have found people across 25 different languages make the link, which has ‘implications for the evolution of spoken language’.
Speakers of languages including Estonian and Finnish had the highest match rate of 100 per cent.
Meanwhile, the lowest (70 per cent) was for speakers of languages including Albanian and Mandarin Chinese.
Professor Perlman stresses that there is ‘no right or wrong answer’ to the R/L test – but it’s interesting to see how strong the effect is universally.
‘People have a very strong sense that the repetitive amplitude modulations of the R sound – on and off fluctuations of sound, corresponding to the intermittent tongue movements – bear a resemblance to the jagged shape of the line and to rough textures,’ he told MailOnline.
‘In contrast, the lack of modulations in the L sound give a sense of straightness or smoothness.’
It’s thought the effect is as universal than ‘bouba/kiki’ – the tendency to associate the made-up word ‘bouba’ with a round shape and ‘kiki’ with a spiky shape.
In a study back in 2021, Professor Perlman and colleagues showed the bouba/kiki effect exists across speakers of 25 different languages.
The bouba/kiki and R/L effects seem to suggest that all humans recognise a universal language – one that we’ve barely scratched the surface of.
Despite receiving little scientific attention until now, the R/L effect has already been used in the advertising industry.
In the 1980s, the American potato chip Ruffles used the slogan ‘Ruffles have ridges’, spoken with heavy emphasis on the trilled R sound.
Spectrograms of this ad slogan reveal vertical grooves known as ‘striations’, which resemble the physical crinkle-cut grooves in the snack.
‘These kinds of cross-modal correspondences might have influenced the evolution of spoken languages, shaping the words we use to talk about texture and shape,’ said Professor Perlman.
People have noted the R/L effect anecdotally before now, the academic added, and in a prior study he looked at trilled Rs in words that refer to rough textures, but this is the first study to test the effect experimentally.
