Prosody and Humor
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21-tran thanh ai
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The present study Our present goal was to test whether speaker attitudes such as sarcasm, which are commonly expressed in most cultures, can be understood from their vocal expres- sion in a foreign language. This aim arose in light of the fact that previous work, though few in number, have suggested that prosodic cues mark sarcasm differently across languages (cf. Adachi 1996; Anolli et al. 2002; Cheang and Pell 2008, 2009). This is a significant point, given the inherently negative role that sarcasm plays in communication (i.e., a mocking form of criticism). In particular, results from our previous studies of sarcasm have indicated a profile of sarcastic prosody in one language that is quite comparable to the profile of sincere prosody in another; such a pattern implies perceptual confusability of these two clearly opposing atti- tudes across distinct languages (Cheang and Pell 2008, 2009). Mistaking sincerity for sarcasm across interlocutors who speak different languages could have im- portant social consequences; whether this is a genuine tendency therefore merits consideration. Thus, Cantonese and English utterances conveying sarcasm, sincerity, humor- ous irony, and neutrality that were found to be acoustically distinct from one an- other in our previous acoustic studies (Cheang and Pell 2008, 2009) were presented to native listeners of both Cantonese and English in a cross-linguistic perceptual study. In light of our data which show that the Cantonese and English exemplars 20 Henry S. Cheang and Marc D. Pell of sarcasm exhibit important acoustic differences, especially in the directionality of pitch register adopted in this context (Cheang and Pell 2009), we anticipated that each listener group would have significantly more difficulty to recognize sar- castic intent from vocal cues present in the foreign versus native language due to the salience of pitch/F0 cues. In addition, given that sarcasm and sincerity ap- pear to be strongly contrasted by Cantonese and English speakers using mean F0 but in the opposite direction (Cheang and Pell 2009), we speculated that listeners might confuse these particular intentions if they base their responses strongly on global F0 settings appropriate to their native language. The extent to which other acoustic parameters which are sometimes shared by sarcastic utterances in both languages (e.g., reduced F0 variation, reduced speech rate) would offset language- related differences in mean F0 to promote accurate cross-linguistic recognition of sarcasm could not be predicted with any certainty. As well, no firm predic- tions could be made about the ability to recognize humorous irony in a foreign language, although there is some evidence that neutral prosody is distinctive and leads to reliable cross-linguistic recognition in many instances (e.g., Pell, Monetta et al. 2009; Pell, Paulmann et al. 2009). tải về 1.21 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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