Caffarra, S. 1 , Michell, E. 1 , Motamed Haeri, A. 1 & Martin, C. 1, 2
1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
2 Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science
When nonfigurative utterances are produced, listeners use their expectations based on world knowledge to infer the correct intended meaning (Gibbs, 1986). Speaker accent represents an important source of information listeners might consider in order to successfully interpret the conversational message. Here, we tested the impact of foreign accent on the interpretation of ironic utterances in a behavioral experiment. We hypothesized that the speaker's accent should trigger speaker-specific expectations which will influence the inferred ironic meaning. As foreign speakers do not commonly achieve sophisticated pragmatic skills in their second language (L2), they might not be expected to use complex tropes in their L2 production (Lev-Ari, 2015). This world-knowledge should influence the way listeners infer the non-literal counterpart of foreign accented utterances, with an attenuated perception of irony at the behavioral level.
Forty-one Spanish native speakers participated to a behavioral experiment where they were presented with ironic and literal stories, which could be uttered in foreign (English) or native accent. Two different types of irony were compared with their literal counterpart: common irony, which corresponds to ironic criticism, and uncommon irony, corresponding to ironic praise.
For each story, participants were required to rate the level of irony. Behavioral results showed there was a clear difference between ironic and literal stories in both accents. However, while common irony was similarly rated across accents, the uncommon irony was perceived as less ironic when uttered with foreign as compared to native accent.
These findings suggest that the detection of foreign accent seems to activate specific expectations about the interlocutor's communicative intentions, changing the inferred meaning. These findings support the idea that world-knowledge information associated with the detection of foreign accent is actively used in figurative language comprehension. Listeners' expectations about speakers' identity are constantly updated and this knowledge shapes the final conversational meaning.