The Production and Perception of Irony in Short Context-free Utterances
نویسندگان
چکیده
The present study examines single-word-utterances and focuses on (1) production patterns of irony as opposed to sincerity and (2) listeners’ ability to distinguish between the two without any contextual information. The results of the acoustic measurements show a lower average F0, less F0 variability, a smaller F0 range, lower intensity and longer durations for the ironic stimuli. The perception experiment resulted in overall recognition rates of more than 80%, the sincere utterances being identified significantly better than the ironic ones. Female listeners tend to be better at recognizing irony in female speakers than are male listeners.
منابع مشابه
Recognizing Verbal Irony in Spontaneous Speech
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 in...
متن کاملAudiovisual Strategies in the Production of Ironic Speech
Verbal irony is a type of echoic allusion to an attributed utterance or thought (Sperber & Wilson, 1981) that the speaker contrasts with her/his own current thoughts (e.g., saying “You are so brilliant, man!” when he/she actually means “What a clumsy person!”). It has been shown that speakers use a variety of prosodic signals to communicate ironic intentions (see Bryant, 2011). So far, research...
متن کاملGestural codas pave the way to the understanding of verbal irony
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 so-called ‘gestural codas’ (audiovisual cues produced after the ironic utterance) influences irony detec...
متن کاملPerceptual, acoustic and electroglottographic correlates of 3 aggressive attitudes in French: a pilot study
This paper presents an experimental study of 136 utterances of aggressive attitudes in French: sarcastic irony, cold anger, hot anger, and a neutral control condition. Two male actors following a predefined scenario produced utterances on a controlled corpus including logatomes. Perceptual ratings by 28 listeners of aggressiveness, dominancy, and control among a subset of 24 utterances are comp...
متن کاملAre you serious? Irony and the perception of emphatic intensification
Two perception experiments were conducted in order to study the function and signaling of two postulated subtypes of emphasis for intensity in German. The results of the first, semantic-differential experiment confirm previous findings of acoustic analyses that positive and negative intensification are two distinct subtypes of emphasis for intensity. Moreover, irony occurs when semantically pos...
متن کامل