title: Vocal features of conversational sarcasm: a comparison of methods.
abstract: This study investigated vocal cues that differentiate sarcastic utterances from non-sarcastic utterances. Utterances were drawn from videotapes of participant interviews and arranged on a master tape for analysis. Utterances that were identified as sarcastic by speakers and recognized as sarcastic by listeners were randomly arranged with utterances identified and recognized as non-sarcastic by the same participants. Both sarcastic and non-sarcastic utterances were analyzed by two methods-acoustic analysis and perceptual coding. The acoustic analysis proved slightly more successful than the perceptual coding in discriminating between sarcastic and non-sarcastic utterances. The acoustic analysis indicated that fundamental frequency, frequency range, length of utterance, and total amount of sound significantly discriminated sarcastic from non-sarcastic utterances. The perceptual coding method revealed that pitch range, length of utterance, and total amount of sound significantly discriminated sarcastic from non-sarcastic utterances. Moderate correlations were found between the acoustic and perceptual variables.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA 70504, USA. par2323@louisiana.edu
authors.forename: Patricia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rockwell
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D012984:Software; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D014705:Verbal Behavior