Recognizing Uptalk: False Memory and Metalinguistic Commentary for a Sociolinguistic Feature

Abstract

Relatively little work has examined how metalinguistic awareness about sociolinguistic features can impact processes of sociolinguistic memory, which are crucial to the formation of cognitive sociolinguistic representations. This article explores how metalinguistic commentary can bias listeners’ memory of a linguistic feature, uptalk, that is ideologically linked with women in popular meta-discourses. A novel contour-recognition paradigm tests how listeners mis-remember uptalk depending on the perceived gender of the speaker. We provided participants with top-down metalinguistic information about which gendered speakers were most likely to use uptalk to induce metalinguistic bias toward associations between rising contours and speakers of particular genders. Results show a speaker's perceived gender, as well as metalinguistic information provided to a listener, can bias recognition of prosodic contours, but only when this information reinforces listeners’ pre-existing beliefs. Overall, we suggest that linguistic ideologies can shape how listeners interpret and even remember both metalinguistic statements and sociolinguistic variants.