“You look well rested!” Sometimes the intended meaning of a statement can, as is well known, be the opposite of the literal one. A study now sheds light on how irony is conveyed in spoken language. Accordingly, the characteristic shift in stress within a sentence plays an important role: speakers tend to emphasize the words at the beginning of sentences to denote ironic meaning, the results show.
Sometimes it’s meant to be casual and fun, but in other cases it’s also toxic or reproachful: people use the rhetorical stylistic device of irony in different contexts. A speaker says something that actually contradicts his actual opinion. In most cases, this should also be clearly recognizable for the listener in order to avoid unwanted misunderstandings. There have already been indications that people speak in an “unusual” way – for example by changing the tone or speed of speech when making ironic statements. However, the details of the ironic communication strategy have hardly been scientifically recorded to date.
Focus on prosodic stresses
The researchers led by Pauline Larrouy-Maestri from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main have now devoted themselves to this topic. Her focus was on the aspect of stresses within a sentence structure – the so-called prosodic stresses. Usually, this verbal emphasis on certain words or phrases conveys what should be interpreted as important in a spoken sentence. Example: “I like to read and write”. If the emphasis is on “I”, the differentiation from other people can be meant. If “and” is pronounced particularly clearly, “both and” is emphasized. However, the role of prosodic stresses in irony has not yet been systematically investigated.
For their study, the researchers selected 14 short German sentences that, depending on the context, can be interpreted both ironically and according to the wording. For example: “But the dog hears well”, or “Make it a little louder”. The researchers had this collection of sentences spoken by 14 volunteers at the microphone in two different versions: on the one hand they were asked to convey the statements with a literal meaning, on the other hand they were asked to make the sentences sound ironic in a deliberate manner.
The accents slide forward
The resulting 392 voice recordings were then played to 20 study participants. In doing so, they were asked to name those words in the auditory impressions that appeared to them to be acoustically prominent: they identified the perceived prosodic stresses. In the third step, 53 other volunteers rated the extent to which they heard an ironic meaning in the 392 recorded sentences on a scale.
As the researchers report, the statistical evaluation of the results showed a strong significance of shifting the stress within a sentence: The combined analysis of irony evaluations, acoustic features and various prosodic stress features showed that irony is primarily caused by a shift from the end of a sentence to an earlier position is signaled. In relation to the example “Make it a little bit louder” this means: While the “normal” emphasis is more on “louder”, in the ironic version it shifts to “still”.
“By stressing words at the beginning of a sentence, the speaker gives hints that the literal meaning is not necessarily the intended one. This shift in position could serve as a kind of ‘warning’ for listeners to consider possible alternative meanings of the sentence,” concludes Larrouy-Maestri. The results thus make it clear that prosodic emphasis plays a crucial role in the perception of irony. “This finding supports the notion that the dynamic aspect of prosody conveys important cues in communication, and thus contributes to further understanding of sound-meaning associations in humans,” say the scientists.
Source: Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, specialist article: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. doi: 10.1037/xge0001377