Are Tims hot and Toms not?

Sound symbolism – the idea that there are motivated links between the sound of a word and its meaning has been established to be an existing phenomenon across different languages. Especially size sound symbolism seems to be a functional feature in many languages meaning that different types of vowels in words are associated with different physical size. Words with front vowels (e.g. little, tiny) are more likely to be used to indicate small physical size whereas words with back vowels (e.g. humungous, huge) are more likely to indicate large physical size. Because physical size plays an important role in ratings of attractiveness, we tested whether vowels in first names can influence how attractive the bearer of the name is perceived. In our experiment, participants saw faces paired with popular first names and rated the attractiveness of the depicted person. Masculine names were paired with pictures of men and feminine names with pictures of women. The names either contained a front or back vowel in the accented syllable and were within gender group randomly paired with pictures. We found that female raters preferred faces paired with back vowel names while male raters preferred faces paired with front vowel names, showing that the rater's gender – far more than the gender of the depicted person – determined the relationship between vowel quality and perceived attractiveness of faces. Our results confirm the role of sound symbolism in perception of attractiveness.