Prosody and Humor
Henry S. Cheang and Marc D. Pell 7.1
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| 32 Henry S. Cheang and Marc D. Pell
7.1 Future directions This investigation represents an initial attempt to gauge whether speakers of two highly distinct languages, English and Cantonese, can use prosodic information to infer the meaning of commonly-expressed attitudes in their native and a for- eign language; as such, future refinements of the current work can be envisioned. Constructing new and more diverse stimulus materials would be useful; for ex- ample, the number of speakers who produce the stimuli should be increased as a means of capturing the wide diversity of postulated cues for communicating sarcasm in speech (Haiman 1998). Studying further languages and additional at- titudes of interest would also be constructive to build on our findings. Finally, future research could benefit by presenting “speech filtered” utterances which convey specific intentions through prosody in spontaneously produced ut- terances which still control for the presence of semantic meaning. Such a manipu- lation would permit a fuller appreciation of the separate contributions of semantic cues and of prosodic cues in marking sarcasm. While there were firm indications that our listeners could employ only acoustic information to decode the attitudes spoken in their non-native language in certain conditions, there is some possi- bility that the text of the utterances (either semantically or through differentially frequent associations with sarcastic contexts, Bryant 2010) played a role in the recognition of attitudes conveyed in their native language (despite our attempt to control for any influences of semantic information on target recognition in the native language conditions, Cheang and Pell 2008, 2009). Although the potential textual influence of the utterances is a significant consideration, it is still important to note that our earlier acoustic analyses of the tokens employed in the current study have found that certain prosodic cues of sarcasm (F0 in particular) mark this attitude independently of the semantic cues (Cheang and Pell 2009). Regardless, this is a limitation of the current study for which an experimental manipulation such as filtering speech would address. 7.2 Conclusion By examining the relationship between acoustic and perceptual measures of sar- castic utterances, the present work represents a starting point for elucidating the factors that govern the expression of speaker attitudes and intentions, and how such factors differ across languages. We conclude that sarcasm has a unique ex- pression in speech that consistently differentiates it from other attitudes, but that the conventions for signaling sarcasm in the voice vary in important ways across languages, yielding poor cross-linguistic recognition of this attitude. At the same time, it would seem that sarcasm plays an important role in many, if not all, Recognizing sarcasm without language 33 languages (Haiman 1998) and that speakers / listeners routinely use prosody to distinguish this intention from related attitudes. However, they must first acquire knowledge about how specific changes in the acoustic code refer to signaling func- tions accepted by the language community. Thus, while the defining character- istics of sarcastic prosody may not be universal as is often claimed of emotional expressions in the voice (e.g., Pell et al. 2009), the goal of communicating the mes- sage of sarcasm using salient features of the voice is likely to be. tải về 1.21 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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