Do you hear itnow? A native advantage for sarcasm processing

Abstract

Context and prosody are the main cues native-English speakers rely on to detect and interpret sarcastic irony within spoken discourse. The importance of each type of cue for detecting sarcasm has not been fully investigated in native speakers and has not been examined at all in adult English learners. Here, we compare the extent to which native-English speakers and Arabic-speaking English learners rely on contextual and prosodic cues to identify sarcasm in spoken English, situating these findings within current cross-linguistic effects literature. We show Arabic speakers utilize the cues to a different extent than native speakers: they tend not to utilize prosodic information, focusing on contextual semantic information. These results help clarify the relative weight of contextual and prosodic cues in native-English speakers and support theories that suggest that prosody and emotion could transfer separately in second language learning such that one could transfer while the other does not.

Using context and prosody in irony understanding: Variability amongst individuals

“…The absence of consensus amongst these studies could be explained by the use of different kinds of task (e.g., rating of prosodic cues in Woodland and Voyer (2011), discrimination task in Voyer et al (2014) and Deliens et al (2017), interpretation task in Deliens et al (2018) and Peters et al, (2015) with the presence or not of time limit to answer in these studies) and by the presence of individual differences regarding how people use prosody when understanding utterances. Bishop and colleagues (Bishop, 2012;Jun and Bishop, 2015) suggested that the use of prosodic information for sentence interpretation may differ across English-speaking listeners.…”

“…While the impact of contextual incongruity or prosody on understanding irony has led to a significant amount of research, the influence of the interplay between these markers on irony and sarcasm understanding have only recently been investigated in English (Woodland and Voyer, 2011;Voyer et al, 2014;Peters et al, 2015) and in French (Deliens et al, 2017;Deliens et al, 2018). Developing different experiments in English, Voyer et al (2014) found a strong interaction between context and prosody, concluding that prosody contributes to emphasizing the contrast effect in sarcasm perception.…”

“…Their results revealed that the proportion of sarcastic responses in ambiguous contexts remained within the proportions obtained for congruent context-prosody pairs (e.g., negative context matched with sarcastic prosody and positive context matched with sincere prosody) and the incongruent pairs in the direction predicted by the prosody. In a study comparing the ability of native and non-native English speakers to use context and prosody in sarcasm understanding, Peters et al (2015) asked participants to answer a comprehension question (e.g., "Did Angie think John did a good job?"). Answers were based on participants' interpretation of a character's intention as sarcastic or sincere.…”

“…Bishop and colleagues (Bishop, 2012;Jun and Bishop, 2015) suggested that the use of prosodic information for sentence interpretation may differ across English-speaking listeners. While typical subjects are able to integrate contextual information and prosody to understand sarcasm, it has been suggested that individual differences (e.g., in terms of cognitive resource capacity (Peters et al, 2015), in terms of fatigue level (Deliens et al, 2015)) could lead to different strategies when relying on these markers to detect irony.…”

The impact of foreign accent on irony interpretation

“…Shared experiences, beliefs and values among interlocutors (i.e., common ground) facilitate recognition of the final intended meaning [25]. Irony detection is impaired when listeners lack knowledge about the speaker’s linguistic and cultural background ([19]; see also [26]) and the likelihood of figurative inferences increases with the size of the common ground [27,28]. Also, what comprehenders know about the speaker’s characteristics seems to affect irony interpretation.…”