Familiarity and pronounceability of nouns and names

Abstract

Ratings of familiarity and pronounceability were obtained from a random sample of 199 sumames (selected from over 80,000 entries in the Purdue University phone book) and 199 nouns (from the Kucera-Francis, 1967, word database). The distributions of ratings for nouns versus names are substantially different: Nouns were rated as more familiar and easier to pronounce than sumames. Frequency and familiarity were more closely related in the proper name pool than the word pool, although both correlations were modest. Ratings of familiarity and pronounceability were highly related for both groups, A production experiment showed that rated pronounceability was highly related to the time taken to produce a name. These data confirm the common belief that there are differences in the statistical and distributional properties of words as compared to proper names. The value of using frequency and the ratings of familiarity and pronounceability for predicting variations in actual pronunciations of words and names are discussed.Recently, there has been an explosion of research regarding how people store and access proper names. The interest has been enough to generate a special issue ofthe journal Memory (Cohen & Burke, 1993) and at least one entire book on the subject (Valentine, Brennen, & Bredart, 1996). Much of the research has concentrated on how names and faces are related and on whether names and other words are represented separately in the lexicon. The studies reported here are meant to provide a corpus ofratings offamiliarity and pronounceability of surnames for use in experiments in human lexical access of names and for predicting variability in pronunciations ofnames for eventual use in applications such as computer speech recognizers.

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“…Pronounceability refers to the ease of verbalizing a word, with research showing that words of higher pronounceability are processed more quickly, 18 typically appear to be more familiar 19 and thus seem more important. This in turn improves recall for these words and may even affect gut feelings about the terms’ truthfulness.…”