Using context and prosody in irony understanding: Variability amongst individuals

Abstract

The present study sought to investigate, in French, the relative influence of both contextual incongruity and prosodic cues on irony comprehension and to explore whether individual differences exist regarding the relative influence of these markers of irony. Ninety-five participants, all native French speakers, were included in the study. They listened to a context followed by a target utterance presented with either an ironic prosody or a neutral prosody and then, they had to decide whether this target utterance was ironic or not. The stimuli were manipulated according to their degree of context incongruity between contextual information and the target utterance. The main results revealed that all participants relied on contextual incongruity to decide whether the speaker's utterance was ironic or not, whereas only a subgroup also used prosody to this interpretation task, highlighting individual differences in the use of prosody to decode irony. This study also confirmed that context seems to be a more powerful cue than prosody in judging irony.