Prosodic Consequences of Sarcasm Versus Sincerity in Mexican Spanish

This study compared the prosody of sarcastic and sincere attitudes in Mexican Spanish in terms of three sentence-level factors (i.e. fundamental frequency (F0) mean, F0 range, and speed of speech) and three word-level factors (i.e. stressed syllable duration, F0 movement, and stressed vowel intensity). For F0, the connection between utterance-final activity and attitude was also examined. Acoustic and statistical analyses comparing both attitudes based on gender and relative communicative importance of words revealed that across speakers, sarcasm resulted in decreases in speech rate and F0 mean and increased stressed syllable length in attitudinally relevant words. In expressions of sarcasm, males significantly decreased F0 range and movement in relevant words and stressed vowel intensity in all words. They also displayed evidence of an utterance-final circumflex F0 configuration, namely in cases of sincerity. These results expand our knowledge of attitude’s effects on prosody, in general, and of Mexican Spanish prosody, in particular.