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

• Published in: Language and speech Vol. 68; no. 3; pp. 606 - 632
• Main Authors: Calhoun, Sasha, White, Hannah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.09.2025; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Affect; Age effects; Age Factors; Connotation; Deixis; Female; Glottalization; Humans; Listening; Male; Meaning; Naturalness; New Zealand; New Zealand English; Original; Pitch; Pitch Perception; Prosodic features; Semantics; Social factors; Sociophonetics; Speech Acoustics; Speech Perception; Voice Quality; Young Adult; New Zealand; Creaky voice; uptalk; listener age; sociophonetics; biological codes; New Zealand English; iconicity

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 li...