(More honest question: is there enough info in the skeletons / fossils that we have to exclude the possiblity that birds ancestors could modulate sound enough to have "something" like a language, which would have been "lost" after extinction events ?)
The finding seems to be that the bouba-kiki effect is not specific to humans and does not depend on experience. And the previously-existing theory is presented like so:
> scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning.
The finding is supposed to undermine, or at least challenge, the theory. But why? Is the point just that, if other species also have the bouba-kiki effect but do not have language, the bouba-kiki effect probably doesn't play as important a role as we thought? That seems to be the implication (though the innate/learned distinction also seems to be relevant, and I'm not sure why that is) -- but surely the bouba-kiki effect was never believed to be anything like a sufficient condition for the development of language, was it?
Do you have a source on that? Because I would expect anyone studying sound symbolism to find the bouba-kiki effect extremely important which is probably why it's such a widely cited study, also inside linguistics.
Kiki-bouba is important for sound-symbolism definitely! But sound-symbolism is marginal when it comes to language. Iconicity and similar things are very interesting phenomena but they're not the difficult part of language at all and they're not necessary parts of language.
>scientists have considered [the bouba-kiki effect] a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning.
I suppose just working in linguistics, I find this such a fringe and unserious theory. The hard part of language isn't associating sounds with objects (dogs can do that), it's putting those words together to make novel meanings.
I always wanted to see long form content on this. Like I'm sure the cherrypicked clips make it look more impressive than reality but I've owned enough pets to believe they can understand more than just individual words / tone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXJfK1wR_w0
Buddhism, Out-of-Africa, Talking Dogs | Robert Sapolsky Father-Offspring Interviews #96
Research implies that - no, pets don't have complex understanding of word combinations, beyond the usual commands. But, in terms of recognizing words individually - some of the gifted ones show abilities on par with 18-month-old humans.
The uploader has not made this video available in your country
:( didn’t know that this was a thing
You could still say that's recent on the evolutionary time span, given that life on Earth is ~3.5-3.7 billion years old. (Which is within the same order of magnitude as the age of the universe - which is itself wild to ponder.)
Chickens are a human invention.
It's fun to think about theropod language centers. Raptor kiki bouba.