Familiarity and pronounceability of nouns and names

Publication

AuthorsSurprenant, Aim{\\'{e}}e M., Hura, Susan L., Harper, Mary P., Jamieson, Leah H., Long, Glenis, Thede, Scott M., Rout, Ayasakanta, Hsueh, Tsung Hsiang, Hockema, Stephen A., Johnson, Michael T., Srinivasan, Pramila N., White, Christopher M., Laflen, J. Brandon

Year1999

JournalBehavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers

DOI10.3758/bf03200740

Abstract

Ratings of familiarity and pronounceability were obtained for a sample of 199 names and 199 nouns. Frequency and familiarity were more closely related in the proper name pool than the word pool, although the correlation was modest in both cases. Familiarity and pronounceability were highly related for both names and nouns.

Extracted information

AI extracted

LanguageEnglish

Norms collectedfamiliarity, pronounceability

Stimuli typenames, nouns

Stimuli count398

Participant typegeneral population

·Extracted by ollamaMay 13, 2026

Referenced in WordNorms

Subjective familiarity of english wordname homophones1994 The mrc psycholinguistic database1981 A frequency count of 190000 words in the london lund corpus of english conversation1984 Meaning dependent ratings of imagery age of acquisition familiarity and concreteness for 387 ambiguous words1980 Concreteness imagery and meaningfulness values for 925 nouns1968 Ratings of frequency familiarity orthographic distinctiveness and pronunciability for 192 surnames1975