7.
Discussion
In this study we investigated how speaker attitudes are recognized in a listener’s
native language and in a foreign language, using a fully crossed research design
Recognizing sarcasm without language 29
involving English and Cantonese speakers and listeners. Our data imply that sar-
castic intentions are processed in a distinct manner from sincerity, neutrality, and
humorous irony; listeners in both groups recognized sarcasm expressed in the un-
familiar language at a level approximating chance for this task, whereas the cross-
linguistic identification of the other attitudes was generally more successful. In
most cases, recognition of speaker attitudes was facilitated when these expressions
were produced in the native language of listeners, although there were some ex-
ceptions; these points are elaborated further below. On a practical level, our study
highlights the fact that one must be sensitive to potential extra-linguistic difficul-
ties that may arise in the vocal channel while communicating with interlocutors
from different cultural backgrounds.
Focusing on the identification of sarcasm, we found that both groups of lis-
teners were sensitive to the sarcastic intent of utterances spoken in their native
language but were highly error-prone for identifying sarcasm expressed in an un-
familiar language. Broadly speaking, these results argue that (native) experience
with a language is essential for recognizing sarcastic intentions, as listeners had
little ability to recognize this attitude from prosody in a foreign language. The
recognition patterns observed could reflect underlying differences in the acoustic
structure of sarcastic expressions produced in Cantonese and English; as noted
earlier, we reported that English sarcasm is marked by significantly reduced mean
F0, restricted F0 variability, and heightened levels of noise, whereas Cantonese
sarcasm is marked by significantly greater mean F0, restricted F0 variability, and
restricted amplitude variability (Cheang and Pell 2008, 2009). It is possible that
listeners in each group employed knowledge of how sarcasm is expressed in their
own language system as a model for identifying all instances of sarcasm, leading to
predictable misattribution errors in the cross-linguistic context.
To elaborate on this idea, in our cross-linguistic conditions we noted that
sarcasm was most frequently misidentified as “sincerity” by both English and
Cantonese listeners. While our data show that listeners in both groups were rela-
tively successful at identifying sincere utterances spoken in their native language
(63 and 91% correct for Cantonese and English participants, respectively), both
groups concurrently made similar identification errors for sincere and sarcastic
sentences spoken in their non-native language. The observation that sarcasm was
confused for sincerity in the non-native language condition by each listener group
is predicted by differences in our acoustic data for the English and Cantonese to-
kens. When the acoustic profile of our four attitudes was compared, the prosodic
characteristics of sincere expressions were most strongly distinguished from sar-
casm in both English and Cantonese, and we reported that sentences projecting
sarcastic and sincere attitudes in Cantonese exhibited mean F0 levels that were
opposite from their respective English analogues (Cheang and Pell 2009). That is,
30 Henry S. Cheang and Marc D. Pell
whereas Cantonese speakers tended to adopt a relatively high F0 register (mean
F0) to convey sarcasm and a low F0 register to convey sincerity, English speakers
demonstrated the opposite tendency. Different expectations about how mean F0
is employed to express sincere versus sarcastic intentions held by Cantonese and
English listeners could well explain the error patterns noted in our cross-linguistic
conditions. At the same time, these data emphasize that mean F0 serves an im-
portant pragmatic function in both English and Cantonese and that speakers of
both languages accord considerable weight to these cues when inferring speaker
intentions and attitudes.
The misuse of particular acoustic features is unlikely to explain all of the find-
ings vis-à-vis sarcasm and sincerity, since sincere utterances expressed in English
and Cantonese could be recognized at two times chance level by listeners not flu-
ent in these languages. It has been argued that interlocutors typically expect their
communicative partners to express sincere sentiments (Bryant in press; Gibbs Jr.
2000) which is also in accordance with Grice’s Cooperative Principle and commu-
nicative maxims (i.e., listeners and speakers cooperate to exchange information as
effectively as possible by being efficient, truthful, relevant, and perspicuous; Grice
1975). Hence, it is possible that when listening to a foreign language and faced
with utterances for which the acoustic cues marking speaker intentions are am-
biguous, listeners simply erred towards the interpretation which is more frequent
and expected, i.e. that the speaker is being sincere (Gibbs Jr. 2000). These issues
will require further analysis to determine how speaker intentions are judged in a
cross-linguistic setting.
The identification of humorous irony in our study merits some commentary,
since recognition of this intention demonstrated a unique pattern in our four lis-
tening conditions. First, it should be underscored that humorous irony was the
most poorly-recognized attitude for both the English and Cantonese listeners
when judging their native language. One possible reason for this finding is that
the construction of our stimuli made it difficult for listeners to fully appreciate
humorous intent. Typically, humor appreciation requires the presence of a “play
cue”, or meta-message that indicates to listeners that the speaker intends to engage
in non-literal communication, which is followed by violations of expectations gen-
erated by the speaker (Berger 1987; Berlyne 1972; Suls 1983). Since we presented
only short utterances that were devoid of context, our stimuli could not promote
expectations which would be violated to convey humor, and as such, the prosodic
features of these utterances may have had little value as “play cues” in the native
language.
Also of note was the finding that, irrespective of language or listener group,
the humorous irony tokens were commonly identified as sarcasm in all of our lis-
tening conditions. By contrast, the opposite was not true, i.e., the present listeners
Recognizing sarcasm without language 31
did not tend to identify sarcasm as humor. This pattern may be accounted for by
overlap in the functional role of sarcasm and humorous irony during communica-
tion; aside from its principal role of negative criticism, sarcasm can often be hu-
morous, although not necessarily (Colston and O’Brien 2000). By contrast, humor
seldom shares the critical intent of sarcastic messages (Anolli et al. 2002), which
could explain why the tokens of humorous irony were often interpreted as sar-
casm (and not vice versa). Interestingly, the fact that humor stimuli were usually
interpreted as being non-literal, or conveying some form of irony (i.e., humor or
sarcasm) across our different listening conditions, suggests that there were certain
prosodic cues in these stimuli which broadly signalled ironic intentions that can
be recognized independent of language experience (Haiman 1990). This statement
contrasts with our conclusion that recognizing sarcasm is specifically dependent
on language experience; these issues will need to be explored in future research.
More generally, our results show that there were overall differences in how well
each listener group identified attitudes in their native language. While the perfor-
mance of each group was facilitated by the presentation of native-language stim-
uli, it is clear that the English listeners benefited more in this condition than the
Cantonese listeners. Research suggests that there is considerable individual vari-
ability in the ability to successfully perceive affective and attitudinal states (Ivanko,
Pexman, and Olinek 2004; Rockwell 2000b; Schaffer 1982; Toplak and Katz 2000)
and this could have contributed in part to the group differences. However, our
data imply that variation in the recognition of particular attitudes was relatively
comparable for our two listener groups (review error bars in Figure 1).
Perhaps a better explanation for these group differences relates to basic differ-
ences between the two languages of interest here; specifically, Cantonese is known
to employ additional means of signalling sarcasm in speech that are not used in
English and were not present in our materials. In Cantonese, particles (i.e., utter-
ance final non-word suffixes) are important for certain pragmatic and syntactic
functions performed by acoustic cues in English. For example, the addition of /
mae/ at the end of an utterance changes the mode from declarative to interroga-
tive in Cantonese (among other dialects of Chinese, Chao 1968; Matthews and
Yip 1994). In other contexts, critical attitudes such as sarcasm can be marked by
specific particles in Cantonese (Chan 2002; Matthews and Yip 1994), although
these particles were not present at the ends of the Cantonese utterances in our
study. Although particles are not compulsory in most contexts in which they oc-
cur (as prosodic features do nonetheless perform prominent signalling functions,
Fok 1974; Vance 1976), these may have been expected by Cantonese listeners in
many instances and their absence may have influenced the data in some manner.
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