Sex-biased sound symbolism in French first names

Sex-Biased Sound Symbolism in English-Language First Names

Sexual selection has resulted in sex-based size dimorphism in many mammals, including humans. In Western societies, average to taller stature men and comparatively shorter, slimmer women have higher reproductive success and are typically considered more attractive. This size dimorphism also extends to vocalisations in many species, again including humans, with larger individuals exhibiting lowe...

Sex, Sound Symbolism, and Sociolinguistics

What’s in a Name? Sound Symbolism and Gender in First Names

Although the arbitrariness of language has been considered one of its defining features, studies have demonstrated that certain phonemes tend to be associated with certain kinds of meaning. A well-known example is the Bouba/Kiki effect, in which nonwords like bouba are associated with round shapes while nonwords like kiki are associated with sharp shapes. These sound symbolic associations have ...

Sound Symbolism

Sound symbolism is the term for a hypothesized systematic relationship between sound and meaning (Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala 1994). The idea that there might be a non-arbitrary relationship between the physical aspect of a speech signal and its meaning is quite an old idea, dating back at least to the time of Plato who, in his work Cratylus, had Socrates debating with two pupils the issue of whet...

Synthesized size-sound sound-symbolism

Studies of sound symbolism have shown that people can associate sound and meaning in consistent ways when presented with maximally contrastive stimulus pairs of nonwords such as bouba/kiki (rounded/sharp) or mil/mal (small/big). Recent work has shown the effect extends to antonymic words from natural languages and has proposed a role for shared cross-modal correspondences in biasing formto-mean...