On the role of prosody in the production and evaluation of German hate speech
Jana Neitsch, Oliver Niebuhr · 2020
Hate speech targeting minority groups is a growing source of concern and not restricted to written language. It also occurs in spoken language in and beyond social media platforms. Given that, it is striking how little is known so far about the communicative and linguistic mechanisms of hate speech. The present study on German investigates participants’ evaluation of subtypes of spoken hate speech (irony: IRO; Holocaust reference: HOL), derived from original (ORIG) hate speech items contained in a Twitter-Facebook corpus. The hate-speech items were elicited from a phonetically trained speaker and, in this spoken form, rated by listeners on two dimensions: personal (un)acceptability and necessity of legal/societal consequences for the speaker. Beyond correlations of these ratings with the prosody of the spoken hate speech items, we found lowest ratings for IRO and highest for HOL items, with ORIG items falling in between the two extremes. In conclusion, hate speech is no homogeneous phenomenon in terms of its perceptual evaluation and, in the case of spoken hate speech, prosody has an effect on how severely hate speech is rated.