French speakers' use of sound symbolic patterns to assign gender to French and English nonce names

Abstract

Gender-based sound symbolic patterns have been documented in corpora of given names in several languages. Name-gendering experiments show that native speakers use many, but not all, of these patterns to assign gender to nonce names in their native and non-native languages, suggesting that some patterns may be productive in speakers’ minds. This study extends this experimental work to a new language, French, by examining how French speakers assign gender to English and French nonce names and comparing their results to those of English speakers. It finds  that, like speakers of other languages, French speakers use some, but not all, factors to assign gender to names in both their native and non-native languages. Furthermore, English and French speakers use the patterns in the study in the same way, in contrast to Sullivan (2020)'s study of English and Korean speakers, suggesting that familiarity is an important factor in extending the use of gender-based sound symbolism beyond one's native language.