Sound and Emotion in Given Names

Abstract

An analysis of the distribution of phonemes in men's and women's names confirmed several past findings, e.g., women's names were more variable and longer, contained more vowels, and were more likely to end with a vowel, especially schwa. Assigning emotional character to individual phonemes revealed that emotional information was encoded in name sounds. Men's names included significantly more cheerful, active, nasty, and unpleasant phonemes while women's names contained more soft, pleasant, passive, and sad phonemes. Phonemic information successfully classified sex. Finally, common androgynous names were found to be emotionally feminine in their distribution of phonemes.