Undergraduate Savannah Jane Williams Publishes in Proceedings of the LSA

Savannah Jane Williams, recipient of the 2021 SPARK Award for Undergraduate Research, has recently published the results of this research project in Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, together with her faculty mentor Dr. Peggy Renwick.

This research examines sound symbolic principles in male and female personal names in English and changes in naming patterns over time, based on a statistical analysis of a data set of 5600 names sourced from the US Social Security Administration. The study finds that female names are longer, more likely to end in a vowel, and less likely to have initial primary stress, and that names for both sexes exhibit change over time, shifting towards a pattern previously associated with female names. 

Williams, Savannah Jane & Margaret Renwick. 2022. Modeling language change in English first names. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 7(1). 5243. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v7i1.5243.