Do all words have an innate connection to certain images and ideas? In the 1920s, Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler read a poem by Christian Morgenstern that included the line, “all seagulls look as though their name were Emma.”The line resonated with Köhler,and he strongly believed that the appearance of the bird and the sound of the name “Emma” were almost one and the same. He wanted to see if there was any truth in Morgenstern’s line, and conducted a study to find out. Respondents were asked which of the shapes above looked like a maluma and which looked like a takete (both made-up words).
Most people would say the maluma is the soft and rounded object on the left, and thetaketeis the jagged one on the right. This is because of maluma’ssoft M sound, and the rounded mouth shape it takes to produce the word. A tauter mouth shape is needed to make takete, which has sharper T and K sounds.
Köhler’s study illustrated that there is no truly neutral name; words evoke images and concepts that shape how they are perceived. As soon as something is named, there is a shift in people’s perception, almost like a linguistic Heisenberg principle — the act of observing something changes the object being observed
(via The New Yorker)
