由於過去文獻顯示語音訊息為幫助分辨諷刺語氣的重要依據，此研究欲探討臺灣中文母語者其諷刺語氣之語音特色以及聽者從何正確判斷說話者之語氣。除了說話者的態度，句子的型態以及說話者的年齡對諷刺語氣之影響也被納入討論。
研究中，首先進行的錄音實驗錄製了中文母語受試者在不同句子型態裡所表達的 三種態度(中性、真誠、諷刺)。接著，另一批受試者對錄下的句子進行語氣的判斷。 實驗結果顯示，相較於中性態度，諷刺語氣呈現較高的音調(mean F0)、較寬的音調全 距(pitch range)、較低的頻率擾動度(jitter)和音量擾動度(shimmer)、以及較慢的語速 (speech rate)。而與真誠態度比較之下，諷刺語氣則呈現較低的音調(mean F0)、較小的 音調全距(pitch range)、較低的頻率擾動度(jitter)和音量擾動度(shimmer)、以及較快的 語速(speech rate)。年齡則對諷刺語音的影響顯示於音調及音調全距，且對於音調的影 響僅出現於短句(keyphrases)。而在諷刺的語氣中，短句與其他句子型態相比，呈現較 慢的語速。
另外，本研究也發現頻率擾動度、音量擾動度以及語速容易造成聽者混淆說話者所表達的語氣。說話者的諷刺語氣若含有較高的頻率和音量擾動度以及較快的語速，則容易被誤判為真誠的語氣。而說話者的中性語氣如有較低的音量擾動度也會讓聽者判斷為諷刺語氣。而在不同年齡的句子中，音調及音調全距則影響聽者的判斷。較高的音調及較寬的音調全距容易導致年輕說話的諷刺語氣被誤認為真誠。相反地較低的音調及較小的音調全距則會讓年長者的諷刺語氣被誤判為真誠。

Previous research has acknowledged prosodic information as one major component contributes to sarcasm detection. However, the voice quality of sarcastic speech shows no consistency cross-linguistically. This study focuses on the voice quality of sarcasm in Taiwanese Mandarin. Specifically, we investigate whether phrase types and age differences have effects on Taiwanese Mandarin speakers’ delivery and perception towards sarcastic utterances. Six voice quality parameters are examined, including mean F0, F0 range, jitter, shimmer, H1-H2, and speech rate.
A sarcasm elicitation task, which uses a fully crossed 3 (attitudes) x 3 (phrase types) design, was adopted to record participants’ utterances of neutrality, sincerity and sarcasm. Then, a perceptual validation process helped identify the successfully recognized and misinterpreted attitudes produced by the speakers.
Our results showed that Taiwanese Mandarin sarcasm featured higher mean F0, wider F0 range, lower jitter, lower shimmer, and slower speech rate compared with neutrality, but lower mean F0, narrower F0 range, lower jitter, lower shimmer, and slower speech rate than sincerity. Age difference can be seen in speakers’ sarcasm production strategies regarding F0 range and mean F0, while the difference in mean F0 was only observed in keyphrases. Phrase type effect can be seen in speakers’ sarcasm where keyphrases were produced more slowly than the other two phrase types.
Vocalization of jitter, shimmer, and speech rate were found to be major causes for misinterpretation. Sarcastic expression with higher jitter, higher shimmer, and faster speech rate would be considered as sincerity. Sincere utterances with slower speech rate would be recognized as neutrality. Neutral expression with lower shimmer would be misjudged as sarcasm and would be misinterpreted as sincerity if it featured faster speech rate. Moreover, mean F0 and F0 range showed significant effects on misinterpreted expression for different age groups. The sarcastic utterances misinterpreted as sincerity produced by young speakers demonstrated higher mean F0 and wider F0 range. Lower mean F0 and narrower F0 range would cause elderly speakers’ sarcastic expression to be misjudged as sincerity.

Anolli, L., Ciceri, R., & Infantinal, M. G. 2000. Irony as a game of implicitness: Acoustic profiles of ironic communication. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29(3), 275-311.
Attardo, S., Eisterhold, J., Hay, J., Poggi, I. 2003. Multimodal markers of irony and sarcasm. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 16(2), 243–260.
Banse, R., & Scherer, K. R. 1996. Acoustic profiles in vocal emotion expression. Journal of personality and social psychology, 70(3), 614.
Brückl, M., & Sendlmeier, W. (2003). Aging female voices: An acoustic and perceptive analysis. In ISCA tutorial and research workshop on voice Quality: Functions, analysis and synthesis.
Brown Jr, W. S., Morris, R. J., Hollien, H., & Howell, E. 1991. Speaking fundamental frequency characteristics as a function of age and professional singing. Journal of Voice, 5(4), 310-315.
Bryant, Gregory A. 2010. Prosodic Contrasts in Ironic Speech. Discourse Processes, 47, 545-66.
Bryant, G. A., & Fox Tree, J. E. 2005. Is there an ironic tone of voice. Language and Speech, 48(3), 257–277.
Booth, W. C. (1974). A rhetoric of irony. University of Chicago Press.
Capelli, Carol A., Nakagawa, Noreen, Madden, Carry M. 1990. How children understand sarcasm: the role of context and intonation. Child Development, 61, 1824-1841.
Cheang, H. S., & Pell, M. D. 2008. The sound of sarcasm. Speech Communication, 50(5), 366–381.
Cheang, H. S., & Pell, M. D. 2009. Acoustic markers of sarcasm in Cantonese and English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126(3), 1394–1405
Cheang, H. S., & Pell, M. D. 2011. Recognizing sarcasm without language: A cross-linguistic study of English and Cantonese. Pragmatics & Cognition, 19(2), 203-223.
Chen, A., & Boves, L. (2018). What’s in a word: Sounding sarcastic in British English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 48(1), 57–76.
Clark, H. H. (1973). Space, time, semantics, and the child. In Cognitive development and acquisition of language (pp. 27-63). Academic Press.
Climie, E.A., & Pexman, P.M. (in press). Eye gaze provides a window on children’s understanding of verbal irony. Journal of Cognition and Development.
Colston, H. L. (1997). Salting a wound or sugaring a pill: The pragmatic functions of ironic criticism. Discourse processes, 23(1), 25-45.
Cutler, A. H. 1974. On saying what you mean without meaning what you say. Proceedings of the 10th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 10, 117-127.
Cutler, A. 1976. Beyond parsing and lexical look-up: An enriched description of auditory sentence comprehension. In R. J. Wales & E. Walker (Eds.). New approaches to language mechanisms: A collection of psycholinguistic studies (pp. 133–149). NorthHolland.
d’Alessandro, C. 2012. Voice source parameters and prosodic analysis. In S. Sudhoff, D. Lenertova, R. Meyer, S. Pappert, P. Augurzky, I. Mleinek, N. Richter, & J. Schließer (Eds.). Methods in empirical prosody research. De Gruyter.
Dews, S., Kaplan, J., Winner, E., 1995. Why not say it directly? The social functions of irony. Discourse Processes, 19(3), 347–367.
Dehqan, A., Scherer, R. C., Dashti, G., Ansari-Moghaddam, A., & Fanaie, S. (2012). The effects of aging on acoustic parameters of voice. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, 64(6), 265-270.
Deliyski, S. A. X. D. (2001). Effects of aging on selected acoustic voice parameters: Preliminary normative data and educational implications. Educational gerontology, 27(2), 159-168.
Dews, S., & Winner, E. (1999). Obligatory processing of literal and nonliteral meanings in verbal irony. Journal of pragmatics, 31(12), 1579-1599.
Drioli, C., Tisato, G., Cosi, P., & Tesser, F. 2003. Emotions and voice quality: experiments with sinusoidal modeling. In ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Voice Quality: Functions, Analysis and Synthesis.
Elert, C. C., & Hamrnarberg, B. 1991. Regional voice variation in Sweden. In Actes du XIIème Congres International des Sciences Phonétiques (Vol. 4, pp. 418-420). Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, Service des Publications.
Gibbs Jr, R. W. (1986). Comprehension and memory for nonliteral utterances: The problem of sarcastic indirect requests. Acta Psychologica, 62(1), 41-57.
Gibbs, R. W. (1986). On the psycholinguistics of sarcasm. Journal of experimental psychology: general, 115(1), 3.
Gibbs Jr, R. W. (1986). What makes some indirect speech acts conventional?. Journal of memory and language, 25(2), 181-196.
Gibbs, R. W. 1994. Poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language and understanding. NY: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, R. W. 2000. Irony in talk among friends. Metaphor and Symbol, 15(1), 5-27.
Gildea, P., & Glucksberg, S. (1983). On understanding metaphor: The role of context. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 22(5), 577-590.
Giora, R. (1997). Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics (includes Cognitive Linguistic Bibliography), 8(3), 183-206.
Giora, R., Fein, O., & Schwartz, T. (1998). Irony: Grade salience and indirect negation. Metaphor and symbol, 13(2), 83-101.
Gorham-Rowan, M. M., & Laures-Gore, J. (2006). Acoustic-perceptual correlates of voice quality in elderly men and women. Journal of communication disorders, 39(3), 171-184.
Haiman, J. 1998. Talk is cheap: Sarcasm, alienation, and the evolution of language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Haverkate, H. (1990). A speech act analysis of irony. Journal of Pragmatics, 14(1), 77–109.
Hernández Farías, D. I. (2017). Irony and sarcasm detection in Twitter: the role of affective content (Doctoral dissertation, Universitat Politècnica de València).
Hirst, D. J. (2007). A Praat plugin for Momel and INTSINT with improved algorithms for modelling and coding intonation. In Proceedings of the XVIth International Conference of Phonetic Sciences (Vol. 12331236, pp. 1223-1236). sn.
Hoit, J. D., Hixon, T. J., Altman, M. E., & Morgan, W. J. (1989). Speech breathing in women. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 32(2), 353-365.
Honjo, I., & Isshiki, N. (1980). Laryngoscopic and voice characteristics of aged persons. Archives of Otolaryngology, 106(3), 149-150.
Horii, Y. (1980). Vocal shimmer in sustained phonation. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 23(1), 202-209.
Johnstone, T., & Scherer, K. R. 1999, August. The effects of emotions on voice quality. In Proceedings of the XIVth international congress of phonetic sciences (pp. 2029-2032). Department of Linguistics, Univ. of California at Berkeley Berkeley, CA.
Katz, A. N., Colston, H., & Katz, A. (2005). Discourse and sociocultural factors in understanding nonliteral language. Figurative language comprehension: Social and cultural influences, 183-207.
Kim, Jiyun. 2014 How Korean EFL learners understand sarcasm in L2 English. Journal of Pragmatics, 60, 193-206.
Kreuz, Roger J., Glucksberg, Sam. 1989. How to be sarcastic: the echoic reminder theory of verbal irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 118, 374-386.
Kreuz, R. J., & Roberts, R. M. (1993). On Satire and Parody: The Importance of Being Ironic. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 8(2), 97–109.
Lan, C., Hui, P. L., Xu, W., & Mok, P. P. K. (2019). Revisiting acoustic cues of sarcasm in Cantonese [Conference session]. Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
Laval, V., Bert-Erboul, A. 2005. French-speaking children’s understanding of sarcasm: the role of intonation and context. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 48, 610-620.
Leggitt, J., & Gibbs, R. (2010). Emotional reactions to verbal irony. Discourse Processes, 29, 1–24.
Li, Shanpeng., Gu, W., Liu, L., & Tang, P. 2020. The role of voice quality in Mandarin sarcastic speech: An acoustic and electroglottographic study. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 63, 2578-2588.
Linville, S. E. (2001). Vocal aging. Singular Thomson Learning.
Linville, S. E., & Fisher, H. B. (1985). Acoustic characteristics of perceived versus actual vocal age in controlled phonation by adult females. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 78(1), 40-48.
Loevenbruck, H., Jannet, M. B., D’Imperio, M., Spini, M., & Champagne-Lavau, M. (2013). Prosodic cues of sarcastic speech in French: Slower, higher, wider [Conference session]. Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Lyon, France.
Long, D. L., & Graesser, A. C. (1988). Wit and humor in discourse processing. Discourse Processes, 11(1), 35-60.
Mauchand, M., Vergis, N., & Pell, M. D. (2018). Ironic tones of voices [Conference session]. Proceedings of the 9th Interna- tional Conference on Speech Prosody, Poznań, Poland.
Milosky, L. M., & Wrobleski, C. A. (1994). The prosody of irony. In International Society for Humor Studies Conference, Ithaca, NY.
Mueke, D.C., 1969. The Compass of Irony. Methuen, London.
Milosky, L. M., & Ford, J. A., 1997. The role of prosody in children’s inferences of ironic intent. Discourse Processes, 23, 47–61.
Morgan, E. E., & Rastatter, M. (1986). Variability of voice fundamental frequency in elderly female speakers. Perceptual and motor skills, 63(1), 215-218.
Morris, R. J., & Brown Jr, W. S. (1994). Age-related differences in speech variability among women. Journal of Communication Disorders, 27(1), 49-64.
Mozziconacci, S. J., & Hermes, D. J. (2000). Expression of emotion and attitude through temporal speech variations. In Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing.
Mysak, E. D. (1959). Pitch and duration characteristics of older males. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 2(1), 46-54.
Niebuhr, O. 2014. A little more ironic: Voice quality and segmental reduction differences between sarcastic and neutral utterances [Conference session]. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Speech Prosody, Dublin, Ireland.
Orlikoff, R. F. (1990). Heartbeat-related fundamental frequency and amplitude variation in healthy young and elderly male voices. Journal of Voice, 4(4), 322-328.
Oyer, H. J., & Deal, L. V. (1985). Temporal aspects of speech and the aging process. Folia phoniatrica.
Pexman, P.M., Ferretti, T.R., & Katz, A.N. (2000). Discourse factors that influence on-line reading of metaphor and irony. Discourse Processes, 29, 201–222.
Pereira, C., & Watson, C. 1998. Some acoustic characteristics of emotion. In Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing.
Ramig, L. A., & Ringel, R. L. (1983). Effects of physiological aging on selected acoustic characteristics of voice. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 26, 22–30.
Rakov, R. & A. Rosenberg. 2013. "Sure, I did the right thing": A system for sarcasm detection in speech. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH. 842-46.
Rao, R. (2013). Prosodic consequences of sarcasm versus sincerity in Mexican Spanish. Concentric: Studies in Linguistics, 39(2), 33–59.
Rockwell, P. 2000b. Lower, slower, louder: Vocal cues of sarcasm. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29(5), 483–495.
Rockwell, P. (2007). Vocal features of conversational sarcasm: A comparison of methods. Journal of psycholinguistic research, 36(5), 361-369.
Ryan, W. J., & Burk, K. W. (1974). Perceptual and acoustic correlates of aging in the speech of males. Journal of communication disorders, 7(2), 181-192.
Scharrer, L., & Christmann, U. (2011). Voice modulations in German ironic speech. Language and Speech, 54(4), 435–465.
Schötz, S. (2006). Perception, analysis and synthesis of speaker age (Vol. 47). Lund University.
Schötz, S. (2007). Acoustic analysis of adult speaker age. In Speaker classification I (pp. 88-107). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Shuey, E., Herr-McCauley, J., Prohaska, C., & Martin, K. (2003). Perturbation measures and chronologic age. In annual convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), November (pp. 13-15).
Smith, B. L., Brown, B. L., Strong, W.J., & Rencher, A. C. 1975. Effects of speech rate on personality perception. Language and Speech, 18(2), 145-152.
Sperber, Dan., Wilson, Deirdre. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA.
Spotorno, N., Cheylus, A., Van Der Henst, J. B., & Noveck, I. A. (2013). What’s behind a P600? Integration operations during irony processing. PloS one, 8(6), e66839.
Stoicheff, M. L. (1981). Speaking fundamental frequency characteristics of nonsmoking female adults. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 24(3), 437-441.
Stuart-Smith, J. 1999. Glasgow: Accent and voice quality. Urban voices: Accent studies in the British Isles, 203-222.
Whiteside, S. P. 1999. Note on voice and perturbation measures in simulated vocal emotions. Perceptual and motor skills, 88(3_suppl), 1219-1222.
Yus, Francisco. 2000. On reaching the intended ironic interpretation. International Journal of Communication, 10(1-2), 27-78.