What Makes Iconic Pitch Associations "Natural": The Effect of Age on Affective Meanings of Uptalk and Creak.

Abstract

While the field of sociophonetics generally views social meanings of linguistic features as indexical and socially constructed, prosodic features have long been argued to have supposedly natural, iconic, universal associations, according to "biological codes," for example, the frequency code that links high versus low pitch with small versus large body size, female versus male gender (via sexual dimorphism), and hence, affective meanings like uncertainty versus confidence. This study looks at affective meanings of two features of New Zealand English associated with opposing pitch extremes: Uptalk with high pitch and creaky voice with low. In a matched-guise experiment, listeners of different ages were asked to rate short speech samples from young women containing uptalk and creaky voice on a series of affective meaning scales. Results showed that while uptalk was rated more negatively overall, ratings largely aligned with predicted iconic associations of pitch for each scale. However, there were differences by listener age, especially for creak. We argue these results show that the availability of iconic associations of pitch depends on social factors such as the listeners' beliefs and experience, such as group differences related to age, which affect the seeming naturalness of a given iconic link.