Irony: Sound and Vision

Within the novel interest in the importance of multimodality for the production and comprehension of language, we focus on the relative contribution of visual and auditory cues for interpreting speakers’ sincere and ironic communicative intent. Recent investigations have highlighted the prominent role of facial expressions and bodily movements, over and above prosodic cues transmitted through the ironic tone of voice. Besides testing ironic criticisms, paired with their sincere compliment counterparts (Study 1), we specifically focus on ironic compliments and sincere criticisms (Study 2), a type of jocular irony that has been less studied. We confirm the reliability of visual cues for the correct detection of ironic attitudes, but we find that ironic praises are less easily recognized, especially when relying on acoustic cues only.