This took some digging. E-commerce site for baby products, myfirstyears says this was a collaboration with Dr Bodo Winter, Associate Professor in Cognitive Linguistics at the University of Birmingham in 2022. I could not find a paper or any kind of mention in his research, so he must be very proud of it.

The shop was kind enough to mention some methodology though.

A list from BabyCentre of the 100 most popular baby names for boys and girls, both in the US and UK, was used as a starting point, providing us with 400 popular baby names.

From this, we worked down each list, translating each of the names phonetically using the toPhonetics translator.

Any names which we could not translate using the toPhonetics translator were excluded, for consistency purposes.

Once we had a list of the 50 most popular baby names for UK boys and girls, and US boys and girls, we then moved onto scoring each name, using the UK table in Adelman et al. (2018)’s paper to attribute a valence figure to each phoneme included in each name.

Finally, we calculated the sum of each name’s score, using these final figures to rank each list of top 50 names.

I’ll politely ignore “according to science”, but the greekreporter and I have very different interpretations of the phrases “in the world”, and “…a diverse group of participants who listened to the pronunciation of 100 different names. Their reactions were carefully analyzed…”.

This is AI SEO slop. They’ve recycled advertising for a baby product shop into marketing for Greece, and degraded even the questionable quality of the former.