Previous research has shown that in different languages ironic speech is acoustically modulated compared to literal speech, and these modulations are assumed to aid the listener in the comprehension process by acting as cues that mark utterances as ironic. The present study was conducted to identify paraverbal features of German "ironic…

A pair of speaking and listening studies investigated the prosody of sentences with temporary Object/Clause and Late/Early Closure ambiguities. Speakers reliably produced prosodic cues that allowed listeners to disambiguate Late/Early Closure sentences, but only infrequently produced prosody that disambiguated Object/Clause sentences, as shown by…

We examined temporarily ambiguous coordination structures such as "put the butter in the bowl and the pan on the towel." Minimal Attachment predicts that the ambiguous noun phrase "the pan" will be interpreted as a noun-phrase coordination structure because it is syntactically simpler than clausal coordination. Constraint-based…

Deals with the effects of aesthetic quality and argumentational integrity or fairness on the persuasiveness of contributions to argumentation. Basic argumentative dialogs were varied in aesthetic quality via the use of figurative language and in fairness via the addition of faulty, insincere, or unjust arguments.(Author/VWL)

Research on nonverbal vocal cues and verbal irony has often relied on the concept of an "ironic tone of voice". Here we provide acoustic analysis and experimental evidence that this notion is oversimplified and misguided. Acoustic analyses of spontaneous ironic speech extracted from talk radio shows, both ambiguous and unambiguous in…

When the descriptive interpretations that sixth and eighth graders provided for metaphors selected from fifth-grade readers were examined in a Piagetian framework, the poorest interpretations showed characteristics of concrete and pre-operational thought, while the best interpretations showed characteristics of formal operational thought. (RL)