This study investigated the prosodic characteristics of sarcastic speech in Dutch. Twenty native speakers of Dutch produced sentences in a sarcastic and sincere way in a simulated telephone conversation task. Prosodic analysis at the sentencelevel shows that in Dutch sarcasm is characterised by a longer duration, lower intensity, and less vocal noise compared to sincere speech. Utterance type and speaker gender influence the use of pitch and duration to realise sarcasm: pitch is lowered in some utterance types but raised in others, and female speakers expand pitch span, while male speakers use greater durational differences. These findings can partly be explained by referring to an emphasis-based theory of sarcastic prosody, whereby speakers draw attention to what is said by using a slower speech rate and clearer voice, and a distancing hypothesis, whereby speakers lower the intensity and pitch to distance themselves from the lexical meaning of the utterance.

Studies investigating the relationship between musical abilities and speech prosody report that musicians show an alteredoften enhanced-perception of prosody, or report positive correlations between music perception and prosody perception. However, some studies on L1 perception find no such benefits, but show good prosody perception across listeners. In contrast, even advanced L2 users may show difficulties in processing sentence intonation. We hypothesised that musicality might especially be beneficial in challenging circumstances of nonnative intonation perception. To test this, we conducted a metaanalysis of previous research investigating the effect of musical abilities on the perception of sentence-level intonation in L1, L2, and unfamiliar languages. Studies were systematically collected, and included various measures of musicality and intonation perception. The meta-analysis combining these outcomes showed a robust positive correlation between musical ability and intonation perception. This effect did not differ between studies on L1 and unfamiliar languages. We suggest intonation perception in unfamiliar languages might be relatively easy due to the absence of semantic interference. Data on L2 users was lacking. Because semantic processing plays a role in L2 perception, we suggest further research is needed to investigate the influence of musical ability on intonation perception in L2 listening.

The perception of speech prosody in a second language (L2) remains challenging even for proficient L2 users. Eye-tracking evidence indicates that Dutch listeners show difficulty in the processing of pitch accents that signal a contrast (i.e., contrastive focus) in English, whereas native English listeners use this cue in perception to anticipate upcoming information [Ge et al., Appl. Psycholinguist. 42, 1057–1088 (2021)]. Prosody perception abilities in foreign languages have been associated with individual differences in musical abilities [Jansen et al., Speech Prosody, 713–717 (2022)]. We investigated whether musical abilities influenced the processing of prosodic cues by 45 Dutch adult L2 English users, using a visual-world eye-tracking paradigm. Participants listened to sentences with pitch accent cues to contrastive focus on different words, while viewing pictures showing objects and characters mentioned. We investigated to what extent participants showed anticipatory fixations on the image reflecting the alternative of the contrast, after hearing the accented word. We measured participants’ music perception abilities with a standardised test and analysed its influence on anticipatory fixations. Initial analyses indicate that individuals with stronger musical abilities show more anticipation. This suggests that having stronger perceptual resources underlying both music and speech processing [Patel, Front. Psychol. 2, 142 (2011)] may benefit L2 prosody perception.