Fortifying cuteness
Obstruent fortition and Aegyo
The term aegyo refers to a cute style of speech
in Korean with numerous reported phonetic correlates. One of these is obstruent
fortition (OF). The present study examines the gender and age effects of OF
across 21 romantic couples and across eight mock situations (date, workplace,
family, comfort, date-planning, request, expression of love). Results revealed a
significant interaction between performance of aegyo and
age, such that younger participants exhibited higher rates of
OF when performing aegyo than when not performing
aegyo, whereas older participants did not. Results also
revealed a gender effect such that women employed more OF than
men, and a situation effect such that OF was more likely to occur in
romantic situations, suggesting its indexicality of romantic intimacy.
Keywords: Korean sociophonetics,
aegyo
, obstruent fortition,
hyeo jjalbun sori
, short tongue sounds, sociophonetics, cute, gender, soft masculinity, sociolinguistics, variation
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Aegyo
- 1.2Obstruent fortition in aegyo
- 1.3Research questions
- 2.Methods
- 2.1Participants
- 2.2Stimuli
- 2.3Procedure
- 2.4Measurements
- 2.5Statistical analysis
- 3.Results
- 3.1Descriptive results
- 3.2Statistical results
- 3.3Lexical effects
- 4.Discussion
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Jang, Hayeun
2025.
How labial and alveolar consonants evoke the images of softness and cuteness?: Experiments with Korean speakers.
Lingua 314
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