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.