What the sound of your name says about you

The way your name or a word rolls off the tongue can have some surprising effects on the judgements we make. A growing body of research suggests that people tend to make a range of judgments based on nothing but the sound of a word or name.

According to Suzy Styles, a psycholinguist at NTU in Singapore, such sensory associations also reflect our wider physical environment. Sounds like b, m, and oo contain lower frequency components, while sounds like k, t, and i contain higher frequency components. Higher frequencies are in turn associated with brightness, smallness and sharpness, not just in human language.

Read the article here.

Photo: Ben White on Unsplash