Ironic Speech - Evaluating Acoustic Correlates by Means of Speech Synthesis

Authors: Felix Burkhardt, Alexandra Steinhilber, Benjamin Weiss

Abstract:

We describe an approach to evaluate the acoustic correlates of ironic speech by means of speech synthesis. We manually extracted specific acoustic strategies to generate an ironic expression and synthesized them with a speech syn- thesizer with the aim to evaluate the perceptual relevance of these strategies. We specifically investigated four distinguished rules: exaggerated articulation, over- stressing the main focus-syllable, raising the pitch at the end and speaking with extremely low arousal. The perceptual relevance of the modifications were tested with a web-based listening experiment with 63 native German listeners. All four strategies of prosodically signaling irony by synthesis resulted in a preference over the default version.