Personal relationship with the bouba-kiki effect

Today I discovered the bouba-kiki effect. Quoting Wikipedia directly:

This picture is used as a test to demonstrate that people may not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily. When given the names "kiki" and "bouba", many cultural and linguistic communities worldwide robustly tend to label the spiky shape on the left "kiki" and the rounded one on the right "bouba".

And I realised that I experienced this effect since childhood. In Paris, where I grew up, there are two nearby churches:

Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Église Saint-Sulpice (pronounced "sulpiss")

And for as long as I can remember, it always bugged me that the tower of Saint-Germain is spiky whereas the “ma” sound is round, and the towers of Saint-Sulpice are round despite the “iss” sound being spiky.

The story does not stop there. Recent research published in Science [1] suggests that the bouba-kiki effect is also experienced by naïve baby chicks.

And baby chicks are… round. 🐤🐤🐤