Familiarity and pronounceability of nouns and names

Ratings of familiarity and pronounceability were obtained from a random sam ple of 189 surnames (selected from over 80,000 entries in the Purdue Univer sity phone book) and 199 nouns (from the Kucera-Francis, 1967, word databas e). The distributions of ratings for nouns versus names are substantially d ifferent: Nouns were rated as more familiar and easier to pronounce than su rnames. Frequency and familiarity were more closely related in the proper n ame pool than the word pool, although both correlations were modest. Rating s of familiarity and pronounceability were highly related for both groups. A production experiment showed that rated pronounceability was highly relat ed to the time taken to produce a name. These data confirm the common belie f that there are differences in the statistical and distributional properti es of words as compared to proper names. The value of using frequency and t he ratings of familiarity and pronounceability for predicting variations in actual pronunciations of words and names are discussed.