4.1.1 Results of Selective Bias in NN Group and PP Group
The counts of sarcastic responses and sincere responses in the NN group and the PP group were presented in Table 4.1.
Chapter Five Conclusion
5.1 Major Findings
The semantic information from the preceding discourse context, combining with the prosodic clue, affects the interpretation of the utterance. One case where the interaction of context and prosody plays an important role in spoken language is the use of verbal sarcasm, wherein speakers may intentionally alter the prosody to change the message of the utterance. This empirical study explores the perception of Chinese verbal sarcasm through two experiments.
Experiment 1 contains two parts. The first part investigates the distinguishability of sarcastic prosody and sincere prosody from the perspective of seven acoustic parameters. The second part further explores whether Chinese native speakers can perceive the intended meaning of utterances with sarcastic and sincere prosody in context-free situations. Experiment 2 is an online experiment, which is designed to solve two issues: the interplay role of context and prosody in verbal sarcasm perception; the impact force of context and prosody in sarcasm perception. Moreover, Experiment 2 further verifies the conclusions drawn by former studies and testifies the explanatory power of the Metacognitive Assessment Model and the Constraint Satisfaction Model. Here are mian findings of this study.
Firstly, the statistical results obtained via SPSS 21.0 demonstrate that all seven parameters are distinguishable between sarcastic prosody and sincere prosody. Compared with sincere prosody, sarcastic prosody has lower mean intensity, greater intensity variation, wider intensity range, lower mean pitch, lower pitch SD, flatter pitch range, and slower speech rate. The difference between sarcastic prosody and sincere prosody is significant. Besides, native Chinese speakers can distinguish the sarcastic prosody from the sincere prosody even though there is no background information. The results lay foundations for further exploration.
Secondly, both context and prosody play roles in sarcasm perception. Participants do not by-pass the contextual information. The results of the present study do not support the conclusion by Deliens et al. (2017), who believe that pragmatic competence involves the metacognitive component, and the metacognitive ability can guide communicators to identify the interpretative goal and find the most frugal strategy to acquire the meaning of the utterance.
Secondly, both context and prosody play roles in sarcasm perception. Participants do not by-pass the contextual information. The results of the present study do not support the conclusion by Deliens et al. (2017), who believe that pragmatic competence involves the metacognitive component, and the metacognitive ability can guide communicators to identify the interpretative goal and f
