Examining the role of context in written sarcasm comprehension: Evidence from eye-tracking during reading.

Alexandra Țurcan,Hannah Howman,Ruth Filik

doi:10.1037/xlm0000910

Abstract

This article addresses a current theoretical debate between modular and interactive accounts of sarcasm processing, by investigating the role of context (specifically, knowing that a character has been sarcastic before) in the comprehension of a sarcastic remark. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted in which participants were asked to read texts that introduced a character as being either sarcastic or not and ended in either a literal or an unfamiliar sarcastic remark. The results indicated that when the character was previously literal, a subsequent sarcastic remark was more difficult to process than its literal counterpart. However, when the context was supportive of the sarcastic interpretation (i.e., the character was known to be sarcastic), subsequent sarcastic remarks were as easy to read as literal equivalents, which would support the predictions of interactive accounts. Importantly, this effect was not preceded by a main effect of literality, which constitutes evidence against the predictions of modular accounts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Highlights

Using sarcasm carries the risk that the reader might misinterpret the message as being literal
The experiment described in this paper contrasted the predictions of modular and interactive accounts of sarcasm comprehension by examining whether a contextual factor, knowing that a character has been sarcastic before, can influence the processing of subsequent sarcastic remarks
Summary of findings An influence of context was observed on the way in which sarcastic utterances were processed in both regression path and total reading times, on the word that disambiguated the target utterance as being intended literally or sarcastically

Summary

Introduction

Using sarcasm carries the risk that the reader might misinterpret the message as being literal. Theories of sarcasm processing A central topic of investigation in the psycholinguistics literature has been to examine the influence of context on language processing at various levels (i.e., syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) These investigations have typically been couched in terms of contrasting the predictions of modular versus interactive accounts of language processing (see e.g., Degen & Tanenhaus, 2019, for recent relevant discussion). The standard pragmatic model claims that when a sarcastic remark is encountered, the literal meaning is accessed first, and is later replaced by the sarcastic meaning when the reader realises that the literal meaning does not fit with the context It predicts that literal comments should be processed faster (i.e., read more quickly) than sarcastic ones irrespective of contextual factors, due to the extra steps involved in sarcasm processing

Methods

Results

Conclusion