The impact of foreign accent on irony and its consequences on social interaction

Abstract

Literature has shown that foreign-accented (FA) speech modulates the degree of irony perceived by native (NA) individuals, but the subsequent consequences it may have on social interaction are unknown. To address this question, we presented Spanish first language (L1) users with written contexts with ironic/literal praises allocated to either a NA or a FA speaker. Written modality was used to avoid disfluency and to examine the impact of expectations of non-L1 comprehension on irony processing. For each of the 104 contexts, participants had to (1) assess the degree of irony of the speaker’s praise inserted in the context, (2) assess the speaker’s level of friendliness and (3) indicate the level of correctness of the response given to the ironic/literal comment. Results indicate that the speaker’s identity modulates the degree of perceived irony as well as the perceived appropriateness of the responses given to ironic comments, even when the accent is not experienced. The theory proposed to account for the findings is that the expectation one has of a foreign individual’s speech affects language processing that leads to misinterpretations, which may, consequently, deteriorate social interaction between L1 and LX users.