Ever wondered if the sound of your name could reveal something about your personality? Explore the fascinating intersection of phonetics and psychology, as we delve into the subtle ways our names might shape our identities and perceptions.
The Bouba-Kiki Effect
A growing body of research suggests that people tend to make a range of judgments based on nothing but the sound of a word or name.
- This is known as the bouba-kiki effect, or maluma-takete effect, and it extends to human relationships and how we imagine the personalities of people we’ve never met.
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Sound is not a reliable guide at all
Our reaction to a name probably reveals more about our own prejudices
- Preliminary results from an ongoing study suggest that the sound of a name has less of an impact as we find out more about people
- The research feeds into a growing body of evidence that challenges a long-held view in linguistics: that sounds are arbitrary, and have no inherent meaning
- Certain sounds have been found to evoke consistent associations
Suzy Styles, a psycholinguist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, explains that these sensory associations also reflect our wider physical environment
When we hear words that don’t align with the word-pattern of our native language, it’s often hard to do things with that word
- Cultural factors are also likely to affect our reactions to the sound of personal names
- English female names are perceived as small
- In other languages, names can follow a completely different sound pattern
- Sidhu hasn’t yet tested the name-personality association across different languages, but expects that it would vary
