The Acquisition of Sarcasm in L2 British English After Explicit Instruction

Abstract

This study looked at the improvements made by native Dutch L2 speakers of English in their production of sarcastic prosody after a short training by analysing the differences in the prosodic cues before and after the training. Additionally, it aimed to uncover which of these cues is altered first. 12 participants were recorded before and after a short training, after which the data was annotated in Praat and the data separated by cue was extracted using ProsodyPro. The analysis of these results shows that the differences in prosodic cues depended on utterance type and gender. The training helps the participants to sound more like native speakers of English, by moving the production of prosodic cues more to native production values.