and four anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. We thank Nicole Wilson for allowing us to use her materials in the sentence translation task. We thank our many research assistants who aided in data collection and coding.
Despite their frequency in conversational talk, little is known about how ums and uhs affect listeners' on-line processing of spontaneous speech. Two studies of ums and uhs in English and Dutch reveal that hearing an uh has a beneficial effect on listeners' ability to recognize words in upcoming speech, but that hearing an um has neither a beneficial nor a detrimental effect. The results suggest that um and uh are different from one another and support the hypothesis that uh is a signal of short upcoming delay and um is a signal of a long upcoming delay.
Research on nonverbal vocal cues and verbal irony has often relied on the concept of an ironic tone of voice. Here we provide acoustic analysis and experimental evidence that this notion is oversimplified and misguided. Acoustic analyses of spontaneous ironic speech extracted from talk radio shows, both ambiguous and unambiguous in written form, revealed only a difference in amplitude variability compared to matched nonironic speech from the same sources, and that was only among the most clear-cut items. In a series of experiments, participants rated content-filtered versions of the same ironic and nonironic utterances on a range of affective and linguistic dimensions. Listeners did not rely on any set of vocal cues to identify verbal irony that was separate from other emotional and linguistic judgments. We conclude that there is no particular ironic tone of voice and that listeners interpret verbal irony by combining a variety of cues, including information outside of the linguistic context.
We explored the differential impact of auditory information and written contextual information on the recognition of verbal irony in spontaneous speech. Based on relevance theory, we predicted that speakers would provide acoustic disambiguation cues when speaking in situations that lack other sources of information, such as a visual channel. We further predicted that listeners would use this information, in addition to context, when interpreting the utterances. People were presented with spontaneously produced ironic and nonironic utterances from radio talk shows in written or auditory form, with or without written contextual information. When the utterances were read without written contextual information, all utterances were rated as equally ironic. But when they were heard as opposed to read, or when they were presented in irony-biasing contexts, originally ironic utterances were rated as more sarcastic than originally nonironic utterances. This evidence suggests both acoustic and contextual information are used when inferring ironic intent in spontaneous speech, and validates previous manipulations of intonation in studies of irony understanding. "That's certainly a good idea!" could be taken as a compliment or an insult. Does the interpretation depend on how it is said, or what preceded it? According to the principle of relevance, listeners attempt to extract the most relevant meaning of an utterance with the least processing effort, and speakers' efforts should accommodate this (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). If conversationalists attempt to communicate as efficiently as possible given the communicative context, speech should contain semantic disambiguation cues as a function of the richness of contextual information. In two experiments using spontaneous speech taken from talk radio programs, we demonstrate that speakers provide prosodic disambiguation cues when METAPHOR AND SYMBOL, 17(2), 99-117 Copyright © 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.Requests for reprints should be sent to Gregory A. Bryant, Department of Psychology, Social Sciences II, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. E-mail: gbryant@cats.ucsc.edu using verbal irony. We also show that listeners use this information, in addition to written contextual information, when making judgments of ironic intent.Verbal irony is classically defined as the use of words to convey a meaning that is something other than, and especially the opposite of, the literal meaning of the words. This definition, however, does not appropriately characterize the phenomenon and certainly does not explain it. Wilson and Sperber (1992) pointed out many examples of ironical utterances that do not concur with this description. Not only are there examples of ironic speech that do not rely on saying the opposite of what one means, but there are cases where all the traditional criteria of irony exist and the utterance is not ironic. Wilson and Sperber argued that verbal irony is a form of echoic interpretation; that is, speakers communicate an attitude toward some attri...
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