My wife and I often mix up the names of our children and our grandchildren, calling our grandson by his father鈥檚 name and so on. Sometimes we even switch the names of the grandchildren with those of our cats. But we never seem to mix up the sexes. Why is this?
鈥� The reason is that names associate strongly with sex but not with age. If you told me that you know someone called, say, Carl, then I would bet on them being male, but I would have no clue as to whether they are aged 2 or 102. It is the same with a female friend called, say, Clare.
Name-sex associations become so ingrained in us that switching the names of males and females automatically feels wrong. However, certain other titles we use for people do associate strongly with age. I would guess that you rarely, if ever, refer to your infant grandson as 鈥渄ad鈥�.
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With pets, and for similar reasons, switching their names with that of a family member is more likely when the pet has a typically human name like Molly, as opposed to a specifically feline or canine name like Tibbles or Rover.
For instance, my father had a cat called Fluffy, but I do not ever remember him calling me that. You might well mix up male and female pets, though, if they have been spayed and have unisex names.
It would be interesting to look at proneness to name-switching when family members have gender-neutral names like Alex or Pat 鈥� although I am not sure where any of this leaves the musician formerly known as Cat Stevens.
Len Winokur, Leeds, UK
鈥� When learning language, we need to understand a word and store it, to be retrieved when needed. Our brain categorises each word and puts it within an appropriate group.
Family names would be stored together and perhaps further categorised by gender, but not by age. When saying the names of your children you go to the right category but might pick the wrong one, particularly if you are in a hurry.
You are not likely to say a random name that does not feature in your family at all. Other names would be stored in other categories.
It is incredible how quickly we can produce a word in a split second from the 30,000 or so in our heads and string them together into a sentence to communicate the desired message. We can comprehend words just as quickly, too. Language learning and production is far more complex than we can imagine.
Michele Fowler, Speech and language therapist, North Barrow, Somerset, UK
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