The impact of foreign accent on irony interpretation

Abstract

In modern multi-cultural societies, conversations between foreign speakers and native listeners have become very common. These exchanges often include the use of figurative language. The present study examines, for the first time, whether native listeners’ non-literal interpretation of discourse is influenced by indexical cues such as speaker accent. Native listeners were presented with ironic and literal Spanish stories uttered in a native or foreign accent (Spanish and British English accents, respectively). Two types of irony were considered: ironic criticism (frequently used) and ironic praise (less frequently used). Participants were asked to rate stories on their level of irony. Results showed an impact of foreign accent on natives’ non-literal interpretation. The effect was evident in the less frequent ironic constructions (ironic praise), with foreign accented utterances considered less ironic than native accented utterances. These findings revealed that native listeners’ figurative interpretation of ironic praise can change depending on indexical cues, with a reduction of pragmatic inferences in the case of foreign accent.

When is irony influenced by communicative constraints? ERP evidence supporting interactive models

“…The experimental materials were taken from Caffarra et al. (). One hundred‐twenty Spanish stories were created (of six sentences each).…”

“…One hundred‐twenty Spanish stories were created (of six sentences each). The target sentence was always the second‐to‐last sentence, and it ended with either an ironic or a literal target word (these two groups of words were matched for lexical features; Caffarra et al., ). In addition, the pre‐target context could describe a positive or a negative event .…”

“…Story recordings were normalized with respect to average root mean squared amplitude. Acoustic features (intonation, duration, speech rate, and pitch) of the target sentence and target word were matched across conditions (Caffarra et al., ) so that the distinction between story types (irony vs. literal, positive vs. negative context) was mainly based on lexical cues (rather than prosodic cues). Importantly, differences in speech rate, pitch, and duration could not explain any significant interaction in the ERP results since all interactions involving these acoustic features were not significant (all F s < 1.2; all p s > 0.20; Caffarra et al., ).…”

“…Finally, the authors that proposed the constraint‐satisfaction model highlighted that, not only the type of context, but also the identity of the speaker (e.g., being a comedian instead of a priest) influences whether and how people perceive verbal irony and can potentially interact with contextual cues (Climie & Pexman, ; Katz & Pexman, ; Pexman, Ferretti, & Katz, ; Pexman & Olineck, ). Interestingly, in a recent behavioral study, both context and speaker identity were manipulated in the same experiment (Caffarra, Michell, & Martin, ). Spanish native listeners were presented with Spanish ironic and literal utterances and had to rate their degree of irony.…”

“…Contextual biases were manipulated, so that the target sentence could be preceded by a negative or a positive context. Speaker identity was manipulated through speech accent (as in Caffarra et al., ), so that each story could be uttered by a native or a foreign speaker. The present ERP results have a significant theoretical contribution as they can discriminate among multiple predictions based on the presence of interactive effects between speaker and context factors and their temporal localization (Pexman et al., ).…”