Recognizing Verbal Irony in Spontaneous Speech

We explored the differential impact of auditory information and written contextual information on the recognition of verbal irony in spontaneous speech. Based on relevance theory, we predicted that speakers would provide acoustic disambiguation cues when speaking in situations that lack other sources of information, such as a visual channel. We further predicted that listeners would use this information, in addition to context, when interpreting the utterances. People were presented with spontaneously produced ironic and nonironic utterances from radio talk shows in written or auditory form, with or without written contextual information. When the utterances were read without written contextual information, all utterances were rated as equally ironic. But when they were heard as opposed to read, or when they were presented in irony-biasing contexts, originally ironic utterances were rated as more sarcastic than originally nonironic utterances. This evidence suggests both acoustic and contextual information are used when inferring ironic intent in spontaneous speech, and validates previous manipulations of intonation in studies of irony understanding. “That’s certainly a good idea! ” could be taken as a compliment or an insult. Does the interpretation depend on how it is said, or what preceded it? According to the principle of relevance, listeners attempt to extract the most relevant meaning of an utterance with the least processing effort, and speakers ’ efforts should accommodate this (Sperber Wilson, 1986). If conversationalists attempt to communicate as efficiently as possible given the communicative context, speech should contain semantic disambiguation cues as a function of the richness of contextual information. In two experiments using spontaneous speech taken from talk radio programs, we demonstrate that speakers provide prosodic disambiguation cues when Requests for reprints should be sent to Gregory A. Bryant, Department of Psychology, Social Sciences