Mental models of linguistic varieties 283gestalt psychology, Köhler 1933: 153) that allows to hypothesize that angu-
lar and pointed forms as in stimuli 1, 7 and 12 can be related to high vo-
wels. Köhler’s initial experiment presented his participants with different
shapes drawn on a paper and the participants had to attribute artificial
words such as takete and maluma. Unfortunately, these words not only vary
the vowels, but also the consonants, which makes it impossible to tell
whether there is a relationship between high vowels and chiseled, sharp and
pointy forms.Table 5. Raising and lowering in Bern and St. Gallen Swiss German and in Stan-
dard High GermanMiddle Bern St. Gallen Standard English translation
High German dialect dialect High German or cognate
lowering:
/i/: [ʃlem] [ʃlim] [ʃlɪm] ‘bad’
/u/: [noɾ] [nuɾ] [nuːɐ̯] ‘only’
/e/: [blɛtəɾ] [bletəɾ] [blɛtɐ̯] ‘leaves’
/o/ [ɔdəɾ] [odəɾ] [oːdɐ̯] ‘or’
/ë/ [vælʃ] [vɛlʃ] [vɛlʃ] ‘Welsh’
/æ/ [væ:ɾ] [vɛ:ɾ] [veːɐ̯] ‘who’
raising:
/ä/ [xæ:s] [xɛ:s] [kɛːzə]/[keːzə] ‘cheese’
/â/ [ʃtɾɑ:s] [ʃtɾɔ:s] [ʃtʀaːsə] ‘street’
/ê/ [sɛ:] [se:] [ze:] ‘sea’
/ô/ [sɔ:] [so:] [zo:] ‘so’
There is more recent research using a very similar experimental pattern. In
their 2001 paper, Ramachandran and Hubbard report on a study which pre-
sented the participants with drawings such as the two given in Figure 5.
The participants are requested to do the following task: “In Martian lan-
guage, one of these two figures is a booba and the other is a kiki, try to
guess which is which”. The results of this study were clear-cut: between
95% and 98% of the participants assign kiki to the left hand shape and boo-
ba (or bouba) to the shape on the right hand side. Again, the problem is that
the two words vary both consonants and vowels. Therefore I replicated the
experiment with a total of 60 students at the universities of Lausanne and
Fribourg (about one third Francophones, one third native speakers of Ger-