The main purpose of this work is to explore the role played by visual cues
in disambiguating sentences in spoken and signed languages. To do so, we
focused on the recognition of ironic vs. sincere statements in Italian and
in Italian Sign Language (LIS).
Previous studies found that hearers can recognize ironic statements relying
only on the speaker tone of voice (Bryant & Fox Tree, 2002), at least in
their own language (Cheang & Pell, 2009). Our first research question was
the following: In spoken languages, is irony recognizable through visual
cues only? (Study 1)
Our research group (Mantovan et al., 2019) found that in ironic statements
in LIS, specific non-manual markers (NMMs) signal speaker’s meaning (more
raised eyebrows, head nods and lateral tilts in irony) and speaker’s
attitude (mouth corners up/down for compliments/ criticisms). Our second
research question was: Are these NMMs linguistic or affective? (Study 2)
In Study 1 we found that purely visual cues did enable interlocutors to
correctly recognize ironic remarks, whereas in Study 2 we found that
hearing participants who know LIS could detect irony in LIS at a higher
rate than hearing participants not familiar with LIS. However, non-signers
could recognize irony in LIS above chance level.
Taken together, the results of our two studies might suggest a more nuanced
picture of the linguistic and affective status of prosody and facial
expressions, both in spoken and in signed languages.
Select **GLOW TALK ENG.mp4** for the talk in English and **GLOW TALK IS.mp4** for the talk in International Sign Language (IS)