Impact of social knowledge about the speaker on irony understanding: Evidence from neural oscillations

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aim of the present study was to explore neuronal oscillatory activity during a task of irony understanding. In this task, we manipulated implicit information about the speaker such as occupation stereotypes (i.e., sarcastic versus non-sarcastic). These stereotypes are social knowledge that influence the extent to which the speaker’s ironic intent is understood. Time-frequency analyses revealed an early effect of speaker occupation stereotypes, as evidenced by greater synchronization in the upper gamma band (in the 150–250 ms time window) when the speaker had a sarcastic occupation, by a greater desynchronization for ironic context compared to literal context in the alpha1 band and by a greater synchronization in the theta band when the speaker had a non-sarcastic occupation. When the speaker occupation did not constrain the ironic interpretation, the interpretation of the sentence as ironic was revealed as resource-demanding and requiring pragmatic reanalysis, as shown mainly by the synchronization in the theta band and the desynchronization in the alpha1 band (in the 500–800 ms time window). These results support predictions of the constraint satisfaction model suggesting that during irony understanding, extra-linguistic information such as information on the speaker is used as soon as it is available, in the early stage of processing.