Personal Names Identification In An Unknown Language

Proper names (PNs) constitute a substantial part of the mental lexicon, and are inmany ways distinct from regular common nouns (CNs). Morphosyntactically, PNs aredifferent in the sense that they are not preceded by articles and usually they are notinflected, at least in many languages. Semantically, PNs differ from CNs in that they haveso-called token reference, rather than type reference. Phonologically, the prosodic patternof PNs has been shown to be distinct from that of CNs, at least for English.Psycholinguistically, PNs have also been shown to represent a qualitatively different class;tip-of-the-tongue phenomena, for instance, are significantly more common for PNs thanfor CNs. Electrophysiologically, it has been shown that PNs elicit larger N1and P2responses than CNs.In the study of two experiments, we investigated whether proper names (like John,Elizabeth, and Yvonne) are more easily identifiable in spoken language than commonnouns. We placed the proper names in subject and object positions to see if there is somedifference. In the first experiment, participants were Chinese who didn’t know anythingabout Swedish; they saw (some also listened to)35Swedish sentences, and had to guesswhich of two words was a name. In Experiment2, Swedish people who didn’t knowChinese saw (some also listened to)60Chinese sentences, and had to guess which was aChinese people’s name. Our interest was whether the listeners who also heard the namewould do better in recognizing the PN than the listeners who only saw the written version.Together, the results of the two experiments indicated that1) names may be distinctacoustically from nouns;2) this distinction interacts with the word’s position in thesentence;3) there exists a subject bias as the participants got higher scores when PNs wereplaced in subject position.