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Abstract
Some lexical classes are susceptible to the effects of sound symbolism, a hypothesized relationship where speech sounds represent non-phonetic properties. Sound symbolic principles are manifested in male and female personal names in English. While previous research found distinct differences between female and male names in English, the current study fills a gap in existing research by taking a perceptual approach. This thesis investigates potential phonological cues to name gender by employing an Internet survey asking participants to indicate the gender of a given name on a 5 point scale. Statistical analysis conducted via cumulative link model in R found that participants were more likely to assign a name to a female category if the name ended in a vowel; no other phonological characteristics were observed to be significant. This differs from results of previous corpus-based studies, and points both towards a gap between observed patterns in corpus data and the functional salience of English name phonology, and towards change over time in the phonological distribution of English first names.