It is well known that speakers rely on prosodic and gestural features at the time of producing and understanding verbal irony. Yet little research has examined (a) how gestures manifest themselves in spontaneous speech, both during and after ironic utterances; and (b) how the presence of the socalled 'gestural codas' (audiovisual cues produced after the ironic utterance) influences irony detection. In Experiment 1, spontaneously produced verbal irony utterances generated between pairs of friends in conversational dyads were analyzed for semantic, prosodic and visual contrasts. Results show that ironic utterances contrast with immediately preceding non-ironic utterances, both in terms of prosody and gesture. Experiment 2 tested the contribution of the presence vs. absence of such 'gestural codas' to the perception of verbal irony. An irony rating task was conducted in which participants were audiovisually presented with a set of ambiguous discourse contexts followed by a set of matching ironic and non-ironic utterances presented in two conditions, namely without coda and with coda. Results show that subjects detected the speaker's ironic intent significantly better when post-utterance codas were present (88%) than when they were not (56%), thus confirming the hypothesis that visual information produced after ironic sentences is a key factor in the identification of the speaker's ironic intent.

This study investigates the perception and production of a specific type of metaphoric gesture that mimics melody in speech, also called pitch gesture, in the learning of L2 suprasegmental features. In a between-subjects design, a total of 106 participants with no previous knowledge of Chinese were asked to observe (Experiment 1) and produce (Experiment 2) pitch gestures during a short multimodal training session on Chinese tones and words. In both experiments they were tested on (a) tone identification and (b) word learning. Results showed the positive effect of a training session with pitch gesture observation compared to a training session without it (Experiment 1) and the benefits of producing gestures compared to only observing them and repeating the words aloud (Experiment 2). A comparison of the results of the two experiments revealed that there was no significant difference between the simple observation of pitch gestures and the production of speech accompanied by pitch gestures in facilitating lexical tone identification and word learning. Thus, both perception and production tasks with pitch gestures can be regarded as beneficial learning strategies for the initial stages of tones acquisition in the Chinese as a Second Language classroom.

Recent studies on the learning of L2 prosody have suggested that pitch gestures can enhance the learning of the L2 lexical tones. Yet it remains unclear whether the use of these gestures can aid the learning of L2 intonation, especially by tonal-language speakers. Sixty-four Mandarin speakers with basic-level Spanish were asked to learn three Spanish intonation patterns, all involving a low tone on the nuclear accent. In a pre-post test experimental design, half of the participants received intonation training without the use of pitch gestures (the control group) while the other half received the same training but with pitch gestures representing nuclear intonation contours (the experimental group). Musical (melody, pitch) abilities were also measured. The results revealed that (a) the experimental group significantly improved intonational production outcomes, and (b) even though participants with stronger musical abilities performed better, those with weaker musical abilities benefited more from observing pitch gestures.

Previous research has proposed that languages diverge with respect to how their speakers confirm and contradict negative questions. Taking into account the classification between truth-based and polarity-based languages, this paper is mainly concerned with the expression of REJECT (a semantic operation that signals a contradiction move with respect to the common ground, along Krifka's lines) in two languages belonging to two typologically distinct answering systems, namely Catalan (polarity-based) and Russian (a mixed system using polarity-based, truth-based, and echoic strategies). This investigation has two goals. First, to assess empirically the relevance of prosodic and gestural patterns in the interpretation of confirming and rejecting responses to negative polar questions. Second, to test the claim that in fact speakers resort to strikingly similar universal strategies at the time of expressing rejecting answers to discourse accessible negative assertions and negative polar questions, namely the use of linguistic units that encode REJECT in combination with ASSERT. The results of our investigation support the existence of a universal answering system for rejecting negative polar questions that integrates lexical and syntactic strategies with prosodic and gestural patterns, and instantiate the REJECT and ASSERT operators. We will also discuss the implications these results have for the truth-based vs. polarity-based taxonomy.

Research on verbal irony has found that prosodic features such as pitch range expansion, syllable lengthening, and specific intonational contours are common prosodic resources that languages use to mark irony in speech. Yet little is known about the relative weight of these prosodic features in the detection of irony in languages that use these three prosodic correlates. In this paper we present the results of two experiments designed to shed light on the relative contribution of the acoustic cues involved in verbal irony detection. The first experiment-a production task-was designed to confirm that these three prosodic features are typical of irony in French. Indeed, we found that these three features revealed themselves when readers produced a just read ironic utterance as opposed to a literal one. The second experiment presented the same stories as Experiment 1's, but removed a single word from the context that would otherwise determine whether an acoustically presented utterance (which had been based on a literal reading) was ironic or not. The last word in these utterances was manipulated synthetically so as to create five experimental conditions: Not Modified, Modified Pitch Range, Modified Duration, Modified Intonation, and Modified All. Results showed (a) that speakers tended to interpret utterances as ironic when all acoustic modifications (i.e. pitch range expansion, syllable lengthening and marked intonation) were presented together (i.e. Modified_All); and (b) that the Modified_Duration and Modified_Intonation conditions were significantly more likely to encourage ironic readings than the Not_Modified and Modified_Pitch_Range conditions.