Children's Sensitivity to Comprehension Failure in Interpreting a Nonliteral Use of an Utterance

Ackerman, Brian P.

doi:10.2307/1130603

Cited by 37 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Despite their ability to decode paralinguistic cues, children may not treat such cues as a basis for qualifying or even overriding the propositional content or literal message. Explanations such as these can account for children's difficulty with irony (Ackerman, 1986) and sarcasm (Capelli, Nakagawa, & Madden, 1990), both of which require the integration of contextual or paralinguistic cues with opposing literal meanings. The task in the present study was considerably easier in that it did not require any integration of propositional and paralinguistic information.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's Understanding of Emotion in Speech

2001

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Children's understanding of emotion in speech was explored in three experiments. In Experiment 1, 4- to 10-year-old children and adults (N = 165) judged the happiness or sadness of the speaker from cues conveyed by propositional content and affective paralanguage. When the cues conflicted (i.e., a happy situation was described with sad paralanguage), children relied primarily on content, in contrast to adults, who relied on paralanguage. There were gradual developmental changes from 4-year-olds' almost exclusive focus on content to adults' exclusive focus on paralanguage. Children of all ages exhibited greater response latencies to utterances with conflicting cues than to those with nonconflicting cues, indicating that they processed both sources of emotional information. Children accurately labeled the affective paralanguage when the propositional cues to emotion were obscured by a foreign language (Experiment 2, N = 20) or by low-pass filtering (Experiment 3, N = 60). The findings are consistent with children's limited understanding of the communicative functions of affective paralanguage.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's Understanding of Emotion in Speech

2001

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“…Studies which have required children of different ages to recognize sarcasm on the basis of context alone, intonation alone, or combinations of the two sets of cues have shown a developmental progression in the differential use of sarcastic cues. In some reports, sensitivity to sarcastic situational contexts appears to develop first in young children (Ackerman, 1983(Ackerman, , 1986Winner and Leekman, 1991), whereas others claim that sensitivity to sarcastic intonation is acquired first (Capelli et al, 1990;Laval and BertErboul, 2005;Laval, 2004). Regardless of which milestone is attained first, these findings imply a functional dissociation in the cues which contribute to the expression of sarcasm in speech, underscoring the importance of prosody in this context and allowing for the possibility that a uniquely sarcastic prosody exists alongside contextual markers of this attitude.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The sound of sarcasm

Cheang

Pell

2008

Speech Communication

181

128

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“…Several research sources have highlighted the importance of prosody as a cue for detecting sarcasm; for example, adult listeners have been found to identify sarcastic intent in content-filtered utterances ͑Bry-ant and Fox Tree, 2005;Rockwell, 2000a͒. It has also been shown that young children can recognize the intonational markers of sarcasm, and this ability is developmentally distinct from the ability to recognize sarcasm through semantic or contextual cues of speech ͑Ackerman, 1983͑Ackerman, , 1986Capelli et al, 1990;Laval and Bert-Erboul, 2005;Winner and Leekman, 1991͒.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acoustic markers of sarcasm in Cantonese and English

Cheang

Pell

2009

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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The goal of this study was to identify acoustic parameters associated with the expression of sarcasm by Cantonese speakers, and to compare the observed features to similar data on English [Cheang, H. S. and Pell, M. D. (2008). Speech Commun. 50, 366-381]. Six native Cantonese speakers produced utterances to express sarcasm, humorous irony, sincerity, and neutrality. Each utterance was analyzed to determine the mean fundamental frequency (F0), F0-range, mean amplitude, amplitude-range, speech rate, and harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR) (to probe voice quality changes). Results showed that sarcastic utterances in Cantonese were produced with an elevated mean F0, and reductions in amplitude- and F0-range, which differentiated them most from sincere utterances. Sarcasm was also spoken with a slower speech rate and a higher HNR (i.e., less vocal noise) than the other attitudes in certain linguistic contexts. Direct Cantonese-English comparisons revealed one major distinction in the acoustic pattern for communicating sarcasm across the two languages: Cantonese speakers raised mean F0 to mark sarcasm, whereas English speakers lowered mean F0 in this context. These findings emphasize that prosody is instrumental for marking non-literal intentions in speech such as sarcasm in Cantonese as well as in other languages. However, the specific acoustic conventions for communicating sarcasm seem to vary among languages.

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Children's Sensitivity to Comprehension Failure in Interpreting a Nonliteral Use of an Utterance

Cited by 37 publications

References 18 publications

Children's Understanding of Emotion in Speech

Children's Understanding of Emotion in Speech

The sound of sarcasm

Acoustic markers of sarcasm in Cantonese and English

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