The difficulty with recalling people's names: The plausible phonology hypothesis

Abstract

Recalling the name of a person is a simple, but often a problematic, everyday task. There are various explanations of this phenomenon, but here it is argued that the explanations offered so far, by failing to consider learning of names, have overlooked a simple account of name recall difficulty. The starting observation for this viewpoint is that names of people are often non-words, in that they have never been encountered before. This is not true of, say, names of professions. Not only does the relatively high rate of new exemplars mean that people's names are likely to be underlearned, but furthermore, even for equal degrees of learning, a person's name is at a disadvantage because of the high plausibility of most phonologies: "dreaner" is much more readily accepted as the name of a person than as the name of their profession. So specifying the phonology of people's names is inherently a more demanding task, compared to the phonology of other names. The implications of this view are explored with regard to explanations of empirically established name recall phenomena in normal subjects, the patterns of performance of anomic patients and the difficulty of name recall in different word domains. It is shown that these arguments, derived from a real world fact, account in a simple way for existing data and make predictions in different areas of research.

Guess who? Investigating the proper name processing network by means of tDCS

“…Several reasons for the increased difficulty posed by proper names have been suggested, including that they generally lack meaning (Cohen, 1990) and may contain a broader variety of phonological sequences than those found in other types of words (Brennen, 1993). Moreover, unlike common names, proper names, in general, do not have sense, while they possess reference, i.e., they may be considered 'pure referring expressions' (e.g., Kripke, 1980).…”

Meeting Mr Davis vs Mr Davin: Effects of name frequency on learning proper names in young and older adults

“…Several reasons for the increased difficulty posed by proper names have been suggested, including that names generally lack meaning (Cohen, 1990), and that names may contain a broader variety of phonological sequences than found in other types of words (Brennen, 1993). However, there has been little research explicitly testing the effects of variables that may ameliorate or exacerbate the difficulty posed by the task of learning names.…”

Dissociations between the Processing of Proper and Common Names

“…As Brennen (1993) pointed out, Semenza and Zettin (1989) cite patient YOT, described by Warrington and McCarthy (1987), as forming a double dissociation with their patient, LS, who showed an anomia for proper 210 BRÉDART, BRENNEN, VALENTINE names. However, YOT's preserved abilities included the comprehension of proper names and some classes of common names.…”

“…A number of theories can account for the single dissociation, reported earlier, where proper names are more difficult to recall than common names (e.g. the theory of arbitrariness, Cohen, 1990; the "degree of freedom" explanation, Brédar t, 1993; the "set size of plausible phonology" hypothesis, Brennen, 1993;see Valentine, Brennen, & Bréda rt, 1996, for a review).…”