Several sources have recently reported a trend in North American English boys’ names. According to this trend, a disproportionate number of boys’ names contain a final syllabic nasal. This paper presents two studies that investigate this observation systematically. A corpus linguistic study of the most popular names in Ontario and the USA revealed that around 40% of English boys’ names fit this pattern, which has been called “the Age of Aidans”. The second study was a lexical decision task. It was modeled after previous research on sound symbolism (phonosemantics). This experiment demonstrated that speakers preferred pseudo-names for boys that fit the “Age of Aidans”pattern. Taken together, the two studies suggest that final syllabic nasals can be compared to phonesthemes. Current North American speakers of English may perceive disyllabic names ending in syllabic nasals as “good” boys’ names.

最近有一些消息来源报道了北美英语男孩名字的趋势。根据这种趋势，不成比例的男孩名字包含一个最后的音节鼻音。本文提出了两项​​研究，系统地调查了这一观察结果。对安大略省和美国最受欢迎的名字进行的语料库语言研究表明，大约40％的英国男孩名字符合这种模式，被称为“艾丹时代”。第二项研究是一项词汇决策任务。它是根据先前对声音符号（语音语义学）的研究而建模的。该实验表明，说话者更喜欢符合“ Aidans年龄”模式的男孩的假名。两者合计，这两项研究表明，可以将最终的音节鼻音与音素主题进行比较。