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Record W4410604031 · doi:10.3765/plsa.v10i1.5933

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

2025· article· en· W4410604031 on OpenAlexaff
Lisa Sullivan, Yoonjung Kang

Bibliographic record

VenueProceedings of the Linguistic Society of America · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicLinguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCryptographic nonceLinguisticsSound (geography)HistoryComputer scienceAcousticsPhilosophyPhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.010
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.080
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.010
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.025
GPT teacher head0.237
Teacher spread0.211 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueProceedings of the Linguistic Society of AmericaSame topicLinguistics, Language Diversity, and IdentityFrench-language works237,207