TY - JOUR
T1 - Ironic Twists of Sentence Meaning Can Be Signaled by Forward Move of Prosodic Stress
AU - Larrouy-Maestri, Pauline
AU - Kegel, Vanessa
AU - Schlotz, Wolff
AU - van Rijn, Pol
AU - Menninghaus, Winfried
AU - Poeppel, David
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 American Psychological Association
PY - 2023/4/20
Y1 - 2023/4/20
N2 - Prosodic stresses are known to affect the meaning of utterances, but exactly how they do this is not known in many cases. We focus on the mechanisms underlying the meaning effects of ironic prosody (e.g., teasing or blaming through an ironic twist), which is frequently used in both personal and mass-media communication. To investigate ironic twists, we created 30 sentences that can be interpreted both ironically and nonironically, depending on the context. In Experiment 1, 14 of these sentences were identified as being most reliably understood in the two conditions. In Experiment 2, we recorded the 14 sentences spoken in both a literal and an ironic condition by 14 speakers, and the resulting 392 recorded sentences were acoustically analyzed. In Experiment 3, 20 listeners marked the acoustically prominent words, thus identifying perceived prosodic stresses. In Experiment 4, 53 participants rated how ironic they perceived the 392 recorded sentences to be. The combined analysis of irony ratings, acoustic features, and various prosodic stress characteristics revealed that ironic meaning is primarily signaled by a stress shift from the end of a sentence to an earlier position. This change in position might function as a “warning” cue for listeners to consider potential alternative meanings of the sentence. Thus, beyond giving individual words a stronger contrastive or emphatic role, the distribution of prosodic stresses can also prime opposite meanings for identical sentences, supporting the view that the dynamic aspect of prosody conveys important cues in human communication.
AB - Prosodic stresses are known to affect the meaning of utterances, but exactly how they do this is not known in many cases. We focus on the mechanisms underlying the meaning effects of ironic prosody (e.g., teasing or blaming through an ironic twist), which is frequently used in both personal and mass-media communication. To investigate ironic twists, we created 30 sentences that can be interpreted both ironically and nonironically, depending on the context. In Experiment 1, 14 of these sentences were identified as being most reliably understood in the two conditions. In Experiment 2, we recorded the 14 sentences spoken in both a literal and an ironic condition by 14 speakers, and the resulting 392 recorded sentences were acoustically analyzed. In Experiment 3, 20 listeners marked the acoustically prominent words, thus identifying perceived prosodic stresses. In Experiment 4, 53 participants rated how ironic they perceived the 392 recorded sentences to be. The combined analysis of irony ratings, acoustic features, and various prosodic stress characteristics revealed that ironic meaning is primarily signaled by a stress shift from the end of a sentence to an earlier position. This change in position might function as a “warning” cue for listeners to consider potential alternative meanings of the sentence. Thus, beyond giving individual words a stronger contrastive or emphatic role, the distribution of prosodic stresses can also prime opposite meanings for identical sentences, supporting the view that the dynamic aspect of prosody conveys important cues in human communication.
KW - intonation
KW - pitch accent
KW - prominence
KW - prosody
KW - voice acoustics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85158888255&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85158888255&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1037/xge0001377
DO - 10.1037/xge0001377
M3 - Article
C2 - 37079828
AN - SCOPUS:85158888255
SN - 0096-3445
VL - 152
SP - 2438
EP - 2462
JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
IS - 9
ER -