This paper explores to what degree native-English speakers and Arabic-speaking English learners depend on contextual and prosodic cues to recognize sarcasm in spoken English, positioning these findings within actual cross-linguistic effects literature. Arabic speakers are inclined to solely focus on contextual semantic information. These results help explain the relative interest of contextual and prosodic cues in native-English speakers and back theories that propose that prosody and emotion may transfer singly in second language acquisition so that one could shift whereas the other does not.