Phonological Cues to Gender in Sex-Typed and Unisex Names
Date
2007
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Producer
Director
Performer
Choreographer
Costume Designer
Music
Videographer
Lighting Designer
Set Designer
Crew Member
Funder
Rehearsal Director
Concert Coordinator
Advisor
Moderator
Panelist
Alternative Title
Department
Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
Type
Thesis (B.A.)
Original Format
Running Time
File Format
Place of Publication
Date Span
Copyright Date
Award
Language
en_US
Note
Table of Contents
Terms of Use
Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
Rights Holder
Access Restrictions
Terms of Use
Tripod URL
Identifier
Abstract
A growing body of literature suggests that phonological features of English names may provide
cues to gender (Slater & Feinman 1985; Cutler et al. 1990; Barry & Harper 1995; Cassidy et al.
1999; Whissell 2001): women’s names tend to have a larger number of syllables, end in a vowel,
and display non-initial stress, while men’s names are shorter, end in a consonant, and have
primary initial stress. Prior to these studies the sex-typing of names in Anglophone culture was
thought to occur only through convention; if phonological cues are in fact exploited by English
speakers – that is, if they are meaningful - they challenge both the principle of arbitrariness
(Saussure 1959) and the argument that names are pure referencing expressions (Coates 2006). In
a series of small trials, this paper explores both the social conventions and linguistic strategies of
sex typing; the Phonetic Gender Score (Barry & Harper 1995), a quantitative analysis that
predicts the gender of name based on its phonology, is used to evaluate both conventional, sextyped
names and unconventional, gender-ambiguous ones. Surprisingly, many of the
phonological features of English female names are present in unisex names as well, which
provides a linguistic explanation for the instability such names often experience. The Phonetic
Gender Scale is also used to generate novel unisex names, from which English speakers attempt
to infer gender. Taken together, these three studies suggest a certain inability (or aversion) on the
part of speakers to conceive of subjects apart from their sex.