Contrast and assimilation in verbal irony

Abstract

The study investigated a potential link between patterns of perceptual/cognitive biasing effects and interpretation effects in figurative language. Following a recent line of psycholinguistic research that theoretically introduced and empirically verified a predictive relationship between perceptual contrast effects and the pragmatic functions of verbal irony (Colston, 2000; Colston and O'Brien, 2000a,b), the present study tested, (1) whether the broader family of perceptual and cognitive biasing effects found throughout the cognitive, social and other psychological literatures influences aspects of language comprehension, (2) how such an influence would specifically operate, and (3) whether this view accounts for dissociations found on the pragmatic functions of ironic tropes. The results of 4 experiments on 144 participants demonstrated that the pattern of contrast versus assimilation effects found in many psychological research literatures enables prediction of the pragmatic functions interpreted from a speaker's use of figurative language, specifically, the degree of criticism expressed by a speaker using a form of verbal irony. This prediction is also enabled through the way in which the situations that are commented-upon with verbal irony are perceived. The implications of these results for other aspects of perceptual or cognitive biasing effects that might affect figurative language processing are discussed.