Abstract
In modern multi-cultural societies, conversations between foreign speakers and native listeners have become very common. These exchanges often include the use of figurative language. The present study examines, for the first time, whether native listeners’ non-literal interpretation of discourse is influenced by indexical cues such as speaker accent. Native listeners were presented with ironic and literal Spanish stories uttered in a native or foreign accent (Spanish and British English accents, respectively). Two types of irony were considered: ironic criticism (frequently used) and ironic praise (less frequently used). Participants were asked to rate stories on their level of irony. Results showed an impact of foreign accent on natives’ non-literal interpretation. The effect was evident in the less frequent ironic constructions (ironic praise), with foreign accented utterances considered less ironic than native accented utterances. These findings revealed that native listeners’ figurative interpretation of ironic praise can change depending on indexical cues, with a reduction of pragmatic inferences in the case of foreign accent.
Highlights
In today’s modern and globalized society, intercultural communication is largely widespread
The present study examined the impact of speaker accent on irony interpretation
No differences across story types were found for accent strength and intelligibility, meaning that these factors could not contribute to explaining different levels of irony across stories
Summary
In today’s modern and globalized society, intercultural communication is largely widespread. Conversational situations where native listeners interact with foreign speakers have become increasingly common. Given this context, it becomes important to understand how language comprehension in native listeners is affected when utterances are produced by foreign speakers. Previous literature on the topic mainly focused on the impact of speaker accent on the comprehension of literal meaning. The present study explores, for the first time, the impact of a foreign accent on figurative language interpretation; a phenomenon that is pervasive in daily conversations [1,2]. Previous research seems to suggest that speaker identity can impact the way people comprehend utterances. Speaker-related effects have been reported on both lexico-semantic and syntactic analysis, with modulations of word semantic integration [7,8], and attenuated consequences of grammatical violations [9,10]
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