Names with /i/ Suit Positive Faces: The Naming Paradigm

Features of word form (e.g., the vowel i as in meet) are associated with word meaning (e.g., positive valence), termed sound symbolism. Experimentally, sound symbolism is predominantly examined using pseudo-words. The present research employs a new experimental paradigm where participants are shown faces and are asked to choose a suitable name from memory for each face. In two experiments (total N = 399), we tested whether valence (manipulated via facial expressions, Experiment 1a, or likability, Experiment 1b) influences the occurrence of i-phonemes and o-phonemes in first names. To test convergent validity, a corpus analysis (Study 2) examined the association of likability and the occurrence of i-phonemes and o-phonemes using a representative corpus of German first names. Consistent with previous findings, names given to positively (vs. negatively) valenced faces more frequently contained i-phonemes, whereas, unexpectedly, valence did not influence o-phoneme occurrence. Thus, the naming paradigm bridges the gap between controlled pseudo-word experiments and the natural use of real names and can be employed to examine whether sound symbolic associations are stable enough to generalize to meaningful words.