A fine-grained analysis of the acoustic cues involved in verbal irony recognition in French

Abstract

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.

What's in a word: Sounding sarcastic in British English

“…the key words in sarcastic utterances and their counterparts in the sincere utterances) are realised with a longer duration and a flatter pitch contour in the sarcastic condition than in the sincere condition regardless of utterance type and speaker gender. The longer duration of the target words in sarcastic utterances may suggest a slower speaking rate at the utterance level, as reported for American and Canadian English (Rockwell 2000, Cheang & Pell 2008, Cantonese (Cheang & Pell 2009), Mexican Spanish (Rao 2013) and French (Loevenbruck et al 2013, González-Fuente et al 2016. The flatter pitch contour appears to be compatible with a smaller pitch span at the utterance level in sarcastic utterance, as reported for Cantonese (Cheang & Pell 2009), American English (Rakov & Rosenberg 2013), Mexican Spanish (Rao 2013) and German (Niebuhr 2014), but different from the reported use of a larger pitch span in Italian (Anolli et al 2002) and French (González-Fuente et al 2016, see also Loevenbruck et al 2013 and more dynamic pitch contours in Catalan (González-Fuente et al 2015).…”

“…Notably, the studies reviewed above have all taken the whole utterance as the target of analysis, i.e. analysing prosodic variation across the utterance or word-by-word, similar to the studies on sarcastic prosody in other languages (see González-Fuente et al 2016 for an exception). Typical prosodic measurements include minimum pitch, maximum pitch, mean pitch, pitch span and speech rate of the utterance.…”

“…However, production studies examining a range of prosodic parameters in different languages have not only shown similarities but also differences in the use of prosody in expressing sarcasm across languages (e.g. Anolli et al 2002 on Italian; Cheang & Pell 2009 on Cantonese; Loevenbruck et al 2013 and González-Fuente, Prieto & Noveck 2016 on French; Rao 2013 on Mexican Spanish; Niebuhr 2014 on German; González-Fuente, Escandell-Vidal & Prieto 2015 on Catalan). For example, sarcastic utterances are realised with a larger pitch span (difference between the highest and lowest pitch) in Italian (Anolli et al 2002) but a smaller pitch span in German and Mexican Spanish, compared to neutral or sincere utterances.…”

Prosody in the Auditory and Visual Domains: A Developmental Perspective

“…Prosody and gestures also overlap in terms of which linguistic functions they are used for. Infants use visual correlates of prosody to segment the speech stream (e.g., Kitamura et al, 2014 ; Guellaï et al, 2016 ), to organize information at the discourse level (e.g., Nicoladis et al, 1999 ; Capone and McGregor, 2004 ; Mathew et al, 2017 ), and to express emotions, intentions, and beliefs ( Sullivan and Lewis, 2003 ; Esteve-Gibert and Prieto, 2014 ; Berman et al, 2016 ; Aureli et al, 2017 ; González-Fuente, 2017 ). Children are sensitive to the fact that visual cues convey relevant linguistic meaning, and experimental evidence shows that gestures are processed earlier and more accurately than prosodic or lexical cues ( Armstrong et al, 2014 ; Esteve-Gibert et al, 2017c ; Hübscher et al, 2017 ).…”

“…Even more challenging for children are stimuli in which the speaker intentionally mismatches the audiovisual cues of emotion from the contextual and lexical information, with the purpose of being ironic. In such cases, children at 5–6 years of age tend to interpret the utterance literally even if prosodic cues of emotion signal the speaker’s irony ( Nakassis and Snedeker, 2002 ; Laval and Bert-Erboul, 2005 ; Aguert et al, 2013 ; Bosco et al, 2013 ), and only if the utterance is produced together with visual cues of emotion can children infer non-literal meaning ( Gil et al, 2014 ; González-Fuente, 2017 ). Taken together, all these findings indicate that vocal and visual cues of emotion are recognized and used very early in infancy, and that children use these early skills to process other people’s emotions once more complex cognitive abilities are in place.…”