Experimentally Induced Single and Repeated Personal Name Confusions: The Impact of Phonological and Semantic Similarity

Three experiments investigated a common but intriguing phenomenon, that is,repeated personal name confusion, a phenomenon at the border between languageand memory. The purpose of those experiments was to evaluate the impact of thesemantic and phonological similarities on name confusion and to compare repeatednaming confusions (i.e., repeatedly confounding two names) with single confusions(i.e., confounding two names only once) in a same experimental paradigm. In allexperiments, participants (64 middle-aged participants for each experiment) wereasked to memorize the association between 16 names and 16 faces (face-namelearning task). In Experiments 1 and 2, the two studied variables were the phono-logical similarity between the confused names and the semantic similarity betweenthe two bearers of the confused names (using a visually derived semantic code inExperiment 1 and an identity-specific semantic code in Experiment 2). In Experiment3, the impact of those two semantic similarities between the bearers of the confusednames was taken into account, whereas the phonological similarity was not takeninto account. First, results showed a main effect of the phonological and semanticsimilarity on name confusion (more confusions when the names were phonologicallyrelated or when the bearers of the names were semantically related). Second,we found that (1) the combination of the phonological and the semantic similarityand (2) the combination of the two semantic similarities led to an increase of nameconfusions. Third, in the three experiments, we found that the semantic and pho-nological similarities had a similar impact on repeated and single confusions. Finally,results showed that participants always made more single than repeated confusions,except in the case when the bearers of the confused names shared two semantic features.