No, language is still pretty close to arbitrary labels. The handful of tenuous common threads like the bouba-kiki effect don't change the overall picture that much. The simple fact that language varies as much as it does is sufficient to prove that it's only loosely bound to anything universal.

>language is far from arbitrary labels for things

I think this is a misunderstanding of the arbitrariness of the sign. Arbitrary doesn't mean "random" or "uniformly sampled." The fact there are systematic tendencies among languages in how things are called doesn't negate the arbitrariness of the sign, they could have been called other things. We can also decide to refer to things by another name and we can use any arbitrary name we like! There is no limits on what names we can use (besides silly physiological constraints like having a word with 50 000 consonants). But, of course, there's much more to language than just labels!

For me, the interesting thing in this paper vis-à-vis language is that it shows how much innate structure in cognition must shape our language.

> But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes, though surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in frequency?

Sure, but it's a very abstract connection between objects being sharp in vision and frequencies changing sharply in hearing. There's no guarantee any given organism would make the connection.

>But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes

I think the why just got a lot tricker than we imagined. Because we failed to replicate this experiment on other primates, we couldn't avoid a semantic suspicion about those associations. Now we probably have to set semantics aside or let it get a lot weirder, because we can replicate across ~300My.

>surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in frequency?

Maybe, and I think "multi-sensory signal processing" is the best framing, but the representation could also carry harder to think about things like "harm".

It's also super cool because the bouba-kiki effect framing was chosen due to methodological convenience for linguists and cultural anthropologists and their experimental bounds, not neuroscientists or signal processing folks. We could potentially find other experiments quickly, since chicks are a model organism and the mechanism is clear.

Things could move fast here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44280619 it's a good analogy.

I don’t know, but it really should be in units of N dozen.

From the preprint linked above:

> We tested a total of 42 subjects, 17 of which were females.

baba is you