takete

Takete is a term used in the study of sound symbolism, named in Wolfgang Köhler's 1929 experiments concerning the association between auditory and visual form. In Köhler's procedure, participants were shown two abstract shapes—one angular and jagged, the other rounded and smooth—and asked to assign one of two non-lexical labels, Takete or Baluba, to each form. Across participants, the angular shape was consistently matched with Takete and the rounded shape with Baluba, suggesting a cross-modal correspondence between sharp phonetic quality and angular visual form.

The Takete-Baluba paradigm is one of the early demonstrations that phonetic form can reflect visual properties, contributing to the broader field of sound symbolism. The term Takete itself is a proper noun within this experimental context and is not widely used as a general linguistic category today. Over time, researchers have explored related cross-modal correspondences, such as the Bouba/Kiki effect (Bouba associated with rounded shapes, Kiki with jagged shapes) popularized by Ramachandran and Hirstein in 1999. While these findings have been replicated in various cultures and ages, some studies report variability depending on stimuli, task, and cultural background. Nonetheless, the Takete concept remains a classic reference in discussions of sound symbolism and ideophones.