ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024

Examining melodiousness in sarcasm: wiggliness, spaciousness, and contour clustering

Csilla Tatár, Jonathan Brennan, Jelena Krivokapić, Ezra Keshet

This paper compares ways of quantifying the phonetic correlates of sarcasm focusing on two novel measures, wiggliness and spaciousness [Wehrle, Cangemi, Krüger, & Grice (2018) Proceedings of AISV], neither of which has been examined in affective prosody before. We compare these to further F0 measures. In a production study, American English speakers (N=12) were recorded producing identically worded utterance pairs presented in contexts conducive to sarcasm and sincerity. Utterances were analyzed for wiggliness, spaciousness, F0 range, and the SD of F0 mean. The measures were entered into logistic regression models as predictors for sarcastic affect (wiggliness and spaciousness jointly, the others separately); model fit was evaluated with pseudo-R statistics. Results show that wiggliness and spaciousness together are comparable to F0 mean SD and F0 range in that they distinguish sarcasm from sincerity for many of the speakers (N=8). To compare the F0 contours in the two affective conditions, by-speaker contour clustering was performed [Kaland (2021)]. Preliminary results show the ability of wiggliness and spaciousness to capture differences between sarcastic and sincere F0 contours. There is variability in the F0-related phonetic correlates of speakers’ sarcasm, but for many, it may be characterized by reduced wiggliness and spaciousness.