Cross-Linguistic Recognition of Irony Through Visual and Acoustic Cues

To avoid misunderstandings, ironic speakers may accompany their ironic remarks with a particular intonation and specific facial expressions that signal that the message should not be taken at face value. The acoustic realization of the ironic tone of voice differs from language to language, whereas the ironic face manifests the speaker's negative stance and might thus have a universal basis. We conducted a study on 574 participants speaking 6 different languages (French, German, Dutch, English, Mandarin, and Italian-the control group) to verify whether they could recognize ironic remarks uttered in Italian in three different modalities: watching muted videos, listening to audio tracks, and when both cues were present. We found that speakers of other languages could overall recognize irony uttered in Italian when all the markers were present, and they relied mostly on visual cues: In all these language groups, accuracy in the audio-only modality was always lower than accuracy in the video-only modality, although this trend was significant only for Chinese and Dutch participants. Moreover, the rate of recognition in the audio-visual modality was always significantly higher compared to the audio-only, while the difference between the audio-visual and the video-only modality was significant only for the English group. Overall, these results speak in favor of the hypothesis of a common basis for the visual expression of irony, whereas the acoustic markers alone do not constitute a reliable cue for the cross-linguistic recognition of irony.