"Oh, how beautiful" – is that ironic or serious? Hard to say, just by reading the words. Irony is more easily conveyed through spoken language. An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt has investigated what is important.
For their study, the scientists selected 14 short sentences, for example "Make it a little louder" or "But the dog hears well". These sentences were recorded by 14 speakers, one ironically and one not ironically. In the resulting 392 recordings, 20 listeners named acoustically distinctive words. In addition, 53 other participants rated how ironic they found the sentences.
As it turned out, irony was signaled primarily by shifting emphasis from the end of a sentence to an earlier position. This shift could serve as a kind of warning to listeners to consider alternative meanings of the sentence, says the first author of the study, Pauline Larrouy-Maestri.