Baby chicks pass the bouba-kiki test, challenging a theory of language evolution
Summary
Newborn chicks demonstrate a bouba-kiki like association between sounds and shapes immediately after hatching, suggesting an innate perceptual bias. This challenges the idea that such sound-shape mappings are unique to humans and language development, implying deeper evolutionary roots of cross-modal perception. For AI and cognitive science, these findings highlight potential pre-linguistic biases that could inform multimodal models.