Hostname: page-component-cd4964975-g4d8c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2023-03-31T14:14:38.096Z Has data issue: true Feature Flags: { "useRatesEcommerce": false } hasContentIssue true
  • English

Do you hear it now? A native advantage for sarcasm processing*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2015

SARA PETERS ,
KATHRYN WILSON ,
TIMOTHY W. BOITEAU ,
CARLOS GELORMINI-LEZAMA  and
AMIT ALMOR
SARA PETERS*
Affiliation:
Newberry College
KATHRYN WILSON
Affiliation:
Winthrop University
TIMOTHY W. BOITEAU
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina
CARLOS GELORMINI-LEZAMA
Affiliation:
INECO Foundation, Buenos Aires
AMIT ALMOR
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina
*
Address for correspondence: Sara A. Peters, Psychology Department, Newberry College, 2100 College St, Newberry, SC 29108sara.ann.peters@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions[Opens in a new window]

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.

Keywords

sarcasmspoken-languagesecond language acquisition
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , March 2016 , pp. 400 - 414
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We would like to thank the University of South Carolina English Proficiency for Internationals Program for generously assisting us in participant recruitment. This work was partially supported by grants NIH R21AG030445 and NSF BCS0822617.

References

Amir, N., Almogi, B.-C., & Gal, R. (2004, March). Speech Prosody: Perceiving prominence and emotion in speech – a cross lingual study. (pp. 375–378). Nara, Japan.Google Scholar
Ayçiçeği-Dinn, A., & Caldwell-Harris, C. L. (2009). Emotion-memory effects in bilingual speakers: A levels-of-processing approach. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12 (3), 291–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H. (2008). Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J., & Bates, D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 390–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2014). lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. R package version 1.1-7. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4 Google Scholar
Boersma, P. (2001). Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International, 5:9/10, 341–345.Google Scholar
Broselow, E. (1992). Nonobvious transfer: On predicting epenthesis errors. In Glass, S. & Selinker, L (Eds.), Language transfer in language learning (pp. 71–86). Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1978). Politeness: Some universals in language use. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bryant, G. A., & Fox Tree, J. E. (2002). Recognizing verbal irony in spontaneous speech. Metaphor and Symbol, 17 (2), 99–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caldwell-Harris, C. L., & Ayçiçeği-Dinn, A. (2009). Emotion and lying in a non-native language. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 71 (3), 193–204.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Caldwell-Harris, C. L., Staroselsky, M., Smashnaya, S., & Vasilyeva, N. (2012). Emotional resonances of bilinguals’ two languages vary with the age of arrival: The Russian-English bilingual experience in the U.S. In Wilson, P. (Ed.), Dynamicity in Emotion Concepts. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Capelli, C., Nakagawa, N., & Madden, C. (1990). How children understand sarcasm: The role of context and intonation. Child Development, 61 (6), 1824–1841.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheang, H., & Pell, M. (2008). The sound of sarcasm. Speech Communication, 50, 366–381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheang, H., & Pell, M. D. (2011). Recognizing sarcasm without language: A cross linguistic study of English and Cantonese. Pragmatics & Cognition, 192, 203–223.Google Scholar
Cohen, J., Cohen, P., West, S., & Aiken, L. S. (2003). Applied multiple regression/correlation analysis for the behavioral sciences 3rd Ed. Mahwah, NJ: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cutler, A., Dahan, D., & van Donselaar, W. (1997). Prosody in the comprehension of spoken language: A literature review. Language and Speech, 40 (2), 141–201.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
de Jong, K., & Zawaydeh, B. A. (1999). Stress, duration, and intonation in Arabic word-level prosody. Journal of Phonetics, 27, 3–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dewaele, J.-M. (2009) The effect of age of acquisition on self-perceived proficiency and language choice among adult multilinguals. Eurosla Yearbook, 9, 245–268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dewaele, J.-M. (2013). Emotions in multiple languages 2nd Ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Sebastian, N., & Mehler, J. (1997). A destressing deafness in French? Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 406–421.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferreira, F., Bailey, K. G. D., & Ferraro, V. (2002). Good-enough representations in language comprehension. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11 (1), 11–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, S. E., Pickering, S. J., Ambridge, B., & Wearing, H. (2004). The structure of working memory from 4 to 15 years of age. Developmental Psychology, 40, 177–190.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibbs, R. (1986). On the psycholinguistics of sarcasm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 115 (1), 3–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Håkansson, G., Pienemann, M., & Sayehli, S. (2002). Transfer and typological proximity in the context of L2 processing. Second Language Research, 18, 250–273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harley, B., & Hart, D. (1997). Language aptitude and second language proficiency in classroom learners of different starting ages. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 379–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hitch, G. J., Towse, J. N., & Hutton, U. (2001). What limits children's working memory span? Theoretical accounts and applications for scholastic development. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 184–198.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jarvis, S., & Pavlenko, A. (2008 ). Crosslinguistic influence in language and cognition. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jorgensen, J. (1996). The functions of sarcastic irony in speech. Journal of Pragmatics, 26, 613–634.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jorgensen, J., Miller, G., & Sperber, D. (1984). Test of the mention theory of irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113 (1), 112–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keysar, B., Hayakawa, S., & An, S. (2012). The foreign language effect: Thinking in a foreign tongue reduces decision biases. Psychological Science, 23, 661–668.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kotz, S. A., & Paulmann, S. (2007). When emotional prosody and semantics dance cheek to cheek: ERP evidence. Brain Research, 1151, 107–118.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kreuz, R., & Glucksberg, S. (1989). How to be sarcastic: The echoic reminder theory of verbal irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118 (4), 374–386.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loevenbruck, H., Ben Jannet, M. A., D'Imperio, M., Spini, M., & Champagne-Lavau, M. (2013). Prosodic cues of sarcastic speech in French: slower, higher, wider. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual conference of the International Speech Communication Association, pp. 1470–1474. Lyon, France.Google Scholar
Nakassis, C., & Snedeker, J. (2002). Beyond sarcasm: Intonation and context as relational cues in children's recognition of irony. In Greenhill, A., Hughs, M., Littlefield, H., Walsh, H. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Boston University Conference on Language Development, pp. 429–440. Somerville, MA: CascadillaPress.Google Scholar
Pavlenko, A. (2005). Emotions and multilingualism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pavlenko, A. (2012). Affective processing in bilingual speakers: Disembodied cognition?. International Journal of Psychology, 47 (6), 405–428.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pell, M. D., Monetta, L., Paulmann, S., & Kotz, S. A. (2009). Recognizing emotions in a foreign language. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 33, 107–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team. (2014). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. http://www.R-project.org Google Scholar
Rafaee, E., & Rieser, V. (2014). An Arabic Twitter corpus for subjectivity and sentiment analysis. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pp. 2268–2273. Reykjavik, Iceland.Google Scholar
Ramsay, A., & Mansour, H. (2008). Towards including prosody in a text-to-speech system for modern standard Arabic. Computer Speech & Language, 22 (1), 84–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rao, R. (2013). Prosodic consequences of sarcasm versus sincerity in Mexican Spanish. Concentric: Studies in Linguistics, 39 (2), 33–59.Google Scholar
Rockwell, P. (2000). Lower, slower, louder: Vocal cues of sarcasm. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29 (5), 483–495.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, W., Eschman, A., & Zuccolotto, A. (2002). E-Prime reference guide. Pittsburgh, PA: Psychology Software Tools, Inc.Google Scholar
Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A. (1994). Word order and nominative case in nonnative language acquisition: A longitudinal study of (L1 Turkish) German interlanguage. In Hoekstra, T. & Schwartz, B. D. (Eds.), Language acquisition studies in generative grammar: papers in honor of Kenneth Wexler from the 1991 GLOW workshops, pp. 317–368. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the full transfer/full access model. Second Language Research, 12 (1), 40–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slugoski, B. R., & Turnbull, W. (1998). Cruel to be kind and kind to be cruel: Sarcasm, banter, and social relations. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 7 (2), 101–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition: 2nd Edition. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc.Google Scholar
Weingartner, K., & Klin, C. (2005). Perspective taking during reading: An on-line investigation of the illusory transparency of intention. Memory & Cognition, 33 (1), 48–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weingartner, K., & Klin, C. (2009). Who knows what? Maintaining multiple perspectives during reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 13 (4), 275–294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woodland, J., & Voyer, D. (2011). Context and intonation in the perception of sarcasm. Metaphor and Symbol, 26, 227–239.CrossRefGoogle Scholar