Prosodic Profiles of the Mandarin Speech Conveying Ironic Compliment

Abstract

This study investigated prosodic profiles of the Mandarin speech conveying ironic compliment, an understudied subtype of irony in comparison to sarcasm. We compared two sets of utterances that shared the same text but conveyed ironic compliment or direct blaming, depending on the context. Ten prosodic parameters, including F0, intensity, speech rate, and voice quality features extracted from audio and EGG signals were analyzed. Results showed significant differences in all ten prosodic parameters between the utterances conveying these two attitudes. Moreover, the effects of (non-)keywords and speaker gender on prosodic profiles of the Mandarin speech conveying ironic compliment were also examined.