Resumen de Do you hear it now?: a native advantage for sarcasm processing.

Sara Peters, Kathryn Wilson, Timothy W. Boiteau, Carlos Gelormini-Lezama, Amit Almor

• Context and prosody are the main cues native-English speakers rely on to detect and interpret sarcastic irony within spoken discourse. The importance of each type of cue for detecting sarcasm has not been fully investigated in native speakers and has not been examined at all in adult English learners. Here, we compare the extent to which native-English speakers and Arabic-speaking English learners rely on contextual and prosodic cues to identify sarcasm in spoken English, situating these findings within current cross-linguistic effects literature. We show Arabic speakers utilize the cues to a different extent than native speakers: they tend not to utilize prosodic information, focusing on contextual semantic information. These results help clarify the relative weight of contextual and prosodic cues in native-English speakers and support theories that suggest that prosody and emotion could transfer separately in second language learning such that one could transfer while the other does not.