Irony Processing Research Articles

L2 irony comprehension and the role of L2 proficiency and use

The present study investigated how Cantonese speakers learning English as a second language (L2) would comprehend English irony and whether their L2 proficiency and use would moderate their irony processing. Thirty Cantonese speakers with differing English proficiency (intermediate vs advanced) were asked to complete an irony comprehension task in which they had to determine if given comments in literal or ironic situations were positive or negative. The irony comprehension task was immediately followed by a stimulated recall session to further explore the participants’ thought processes while responding to the irony comprehension items. The results revealed that the participants were faster and more accurate when processing positively-valenced comments (literal praise, ironic criticism), compared to negatively-­valenced ones (literal criticism, ironic praise). The findings suggest that learners had greater difficulty identifying ironic praises than ironic criticisms, underscoring the role of valence in second language irony inferencing. The stimulated recall data suggested that the anticipation of irony may accelerate the identification of ironic criticisms. While proficiency facilitated the speed of irony comprehension, the duration of L2 use, especially in speaking, emerged as an important factor in moderating the accuracy of irony comprehension. ABSTRACT (CANTONESE) 本研究調查廣東話(粵語)為母語的英語第二語言學習者如何理解英語的反è«·, 以及他們的第二語言熟練程度和使用情況是否會影響他們對反è«·的理解。三十位不同英語熟練程度(中級和高級)的廣東話使用者完成了一項反è«·理解任務。他們需要判斷在字面意義或反è«·情境下給出的評論是積極的還是消極。反è«·理解任務後, 參與者立即進行刺激回憶環節, 以進一步探索他們在反è«·理解任務時的思維過程。結果顯示, 相較於消極效價的評論(字面批評, 反è«·稱贊), 參與者在處理積極效價的評論(字面稱贊, 反è«·批評)時反應更快, 準確率也更高。這些結果表明, 學習者在識別反è«·稱贊時的困難大於識別反è«·批評。這顯示情感效價在第二語言反è«·理解中的作用。刺激回憶的數據表明, 預期反è«·可能會加速對反è«·批評的識別。儘管第二語言熟練程度有助提高反è«·理解速度, 但第二語言的使用時長, 特別是口語的使用, 爲影響反è«·理解準確率的重要因素。

Comprehending irony in text: evidence from scanpaths

ABSTRACT Eyetracking studies have shown that readers reread ironic phrases when resolving their meaning. Moreover, it has been shown that the timecourse of processing ironic meaning is affected by reader’s working memory capacity (WMC). Irony is a context-dependent phenomenon but using traditional eye-movement measures it is difficult to analyze processing beyond sentence-level. A promising method to study individual differences in irony processing at the paragraph-level is scanpath analysis. In the present experiment, we analyzed whether individual differences in WMC are reflected in scanpaths during reading ironic stories by combining data from two previous eye-tracking studies (N = 120). The results revealed three different reading patterns: fast-and-linear reading, selective reading, and nonselective rereading. The readers predominantly used the fast-and-linear reading pattern for ironic and literal stories. However, readers were less likely to use the nonselective rereading pattern with ironic than literal texts. The reading patterns for ironic stories were modulated by WMC. Results showed that scanpaths captured differences missed by standard measures, showing it to be a valuable tool to study individual differences in irony processing.

Taking stock of an idiom's background assumptions: an alternative relevance theoretic account.

This paper begins by presenting the theoretical background of, and the accompanying psycholinguistic findings on, idiom processing. The paper then widens its lens by comparing the idiom processing literature to that of metaphor and irony. We do so partly to better understand the idiom superiority effect, according to which idiomatic sentences (unlike metaphoric and ironic ones) are generally processed faster than their literal controls; part of our motivation is to reconcile the differences between idiom processing, on the one hand, and metaphor and irony processing on the other. This ultimately leads us to Relevance Theory (RT), which has provided original insights into the processing of figurative language generally, but especially with respect to metaphor and irony. RT has paid less attention to idiomatic expressions (such as break the ice, fan the flames, or spill the beans), where one finds a single RT account that likens idioms to conventional metaphors. Through our overview, we ultimately arrive at an alternative RT account of idioms: We argue that idioms include a procedural meaning that takes into account relevant presuppositional information. For example, an idiomatic string such as break the ice not only asserts initiate social contact, it prompts the recovery of background assumptions such as there exists a social distance that calls for relief. This leads us (a) to apply linguistic-intuition tests of our presuppositional hypothesis, and; (b) to describe the paradigm and results from a pilot experiment. Both provide support for our claims. In doing so, we provide an original explanation for the idiom superiority effect.

Children's processing of written irony: An eye-tracking study

Ironic language is challenging for many people to understand, and particularly for children. Comprehending irony is considered a major milestone in children's development, as it requires inferring the intentions of the person who is being ironic. However, the theories of irony comprehension generally do not address developmental changes, and there are limited data on children's processing of verbal irony. In the present pre-registered study, we examined, for the first time, how children process and comprehend written irony in comparison to adults. Seventy participants took part in the study (35 10-year-old children and 35 adults). In the experiment, participants read ironic and literal sentences embedded in story contexts while their eye movements were recorded. They also responded to a text memory question and an inference question after each story, and children's levels of reading skills were measured. Results showed that for both children and adults comprehending written irony was more difficult than for literal texts (the “irony effect”) and was more challenging for children than for adults. Moreover, although children showed longer overall reading times than adults, processing of ironic stories was largely similar between children and adults. One group difference was that for children, more accurate irony comprehension was qualified by faster reading times whereas for adults more accurate irony comprehension involved slower reading times. Interestingly, both age groups were able to adapt to task context and improve their irony processing across trials. These results provide new insights about the costs of irony and development of the ability to overcome them.

Neural activity during processing Chinese irony text: An event-related potential study.

ObjectiveIrony as an indirect language with unpredictability consumes more cognitive resources, and is more difficult to understand than literal language. This study aims to explore the processing differences between irony and literal sentences using event-related potential (ERP) technology.Materials and methodsThree types of sentences were involved: sentences with predictable literal meaning, sentences with unpredictable literal meaning, and sentences with ironic meaning. The neural responses of the subjects were recorded when they read sentences.ResultsCompared to predictable literal meaning sentences, unpredictable literal meaning sentences and ironic meaning sentences elicited larger amplitude of N400 components. The difference was not significant between the latter two. In addition, there was no significant difference in P600 evoked by the three sentences.ConclusionIn the initial stage of irony processing, the low predictability may result in the difficulty in semantic comprehension, in which the processing patterns of unpredictable and ironic sentences are rather close. In the later stage of processing, ironic integration is not harder compared to literal sentence integration.

The impact of foreign accent on irony and its consequences on social interaction

ABSTRACT Literature has shown that foreign-accented (FA) speech modulates the degree of irony perceived by native (NA) individuals, but the subsequent consequences it may have on social interaction are unknown. To address this question, we presented Spanish first language (L1) users with written contexts with ironic/literal praises allocated to either a NA or a FA speaker. Written modality was used to avoid disfluency and to examine the impact of expectations of non-L1 comprehension on irony processing. For each of the 104 contexts, participants had to (1) assess the degree of irony of the speaker’s praise inserted in the context, (2) assess the speaker’s level of friendliness and (3) indicate the level of correctness of the response given to the ironic/literal comment. Results indicate that the speaker’s identity modulates the degree of perceived irony as well as the perceived appropriateness of the responses given to ironic comments, even when the accent is not experienced. The theory proposed to account for the findings is that the expectation one has of a foreign individual’s speech affects language processing that leads to misinterpretations, which may, consequently, deteriorate social interaction between L1 and LX users.

The roles of social status information in irony comprehension: An eye-tracking study.

The literature on irony processing mainly focused on contextual effect, leaving other factors (such as social factors) untouched. The current study investigated how social status information affected the online comprehension of irony. As irony might be more damaging when a speaker uses it to a superordinate than the other way around, it is assumed that greater processing efforts would be observed in the former case. Using an eye-movement sentence reading paradigm, we recruited 36 native Mandarin speakers and examined the role of social status information and literality (i.e., literal and irony) in their irony interpretation. Our results showed ironic statements were more effortful to process than literal ones, reporting an early and consistent effect on the target regions. The social status effect followed the literality effect, with more difficulty in processing ironic statements that targeted the superordinate than the subordinate; such an effect of social status was missing with literal statements. Besides, an individual’s social skill appeared to affect the perception of status information in ironic statements, as the socially skillful readers needed more time than the socially unskillful to process irony targeting a subordinate in the second half of the experiment in the critical region. Our study suggests that irony processing might be further discussed in terms of the relative predictability of linguistic, social, and individual variabilities.

The Multi-Determined Nature of Online Verbal Irony Processing: A Review of Empirical Studies Employing Eye-Tracking and Event-Related Potentials

Methodologies used in behavioral studies on the processing of figurative languages have been criticized for lack of sufficiently fine-grained recordings. Thus, recent literature on empirical studies on irony processing often talks about advantages of online-processing employing techniques with higher temporal resolution. This article reviews a series of selected Event-Related Brain Potentials (ERPs) and eye-tracking studies on the recognition and comprehension of verbal irony to provide an informed state of knowledge on this particular figurative language. First of all, we will introduce some common eye-tacking measures and ERP components recorded in these empirical studies; then we will enumerate factors involved in verbal irony processing from three differing but closely related dimensions. In this way, we expect to propose future research directions that could embrace more cognitive difference of individuals within the framework of theories about verbal irony comprehension.

Uighur college students’ irony comprehension in Chinese

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: Irony comprehension can be more demanding than literal comprehension in L1. This study aimed to seek an answer to how bilinguals perform in L2 in irony comprehension. Design/methodology/approach: Totally, 85 Uighur College students participated in a self-paced reading task in Chinese, with 81 Chinese native speakers as the controls. In Experiment 1, a scenario was followed by a commentary statement in which the critical word either was literally congruent with the context in meaning or could only be ironically understood. In Experiment 2, the same statement was preceded by three sentences which were either literally consistent with the critical word or created a context for the critical word to be understood ironically. Data and analysis: ANOVAs were conducted on participants reading times (RTs) to the critical words and commentary statement endings in the 14 pairs of discourses. They did not have different RTs for the critical words across the ironic and non-ironic conditions in L1, but had significantly longer RTs in the ironic condition than in the non-ironic condition in L2. Their RTs for the commentary statement endings were significantly longer in the ironic condition than in the non-ironic condition in both experiments, regardless of whether the materials were presented in L1 or L2. Findings/conclusions: Irony comprehension is similar in L2 to how it is in L1. However, salient meaning retrieval (in Experiment 1) and inference-making (in Experiment 2) in irony comprehension, as assumed by the Graded Salience Hypothesis, were more likely to be revealed in L2 than in L1. Originality: This seems to be the first study in the native and non-native domain of irony processing in the procedure of discourse reading. Significance/implications: L2 learners should do as many practices as possible to improve their reading proficiency in the target language.

Irony Comprehension in Bidialectal Speakers

AbstractParallel to globalization, our world is becoming increasingly multilingual. We examined the effect of multilingualism on irony comprehension, focusing on a specific type of multilinguals, that is, bidialectal speakers of two dialects of the same language (Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek). Specifically, we investigated the effects of second language (L2) proficiency and use on a continuous scale. We also examined the cognitive factors that underpin irony interpretation, focusing on executive control. Finally, we aimed to adjudicate between the direct and delayed access models of irony processing. We used an act‐out test involving short videos, where irony was indexed by different (combinations of) cues (context, intonation, and face). Experiment 1 validated that ironic cues were perceived as such and were distinguishable from other comparable nonironic cues. Experiment 2 revealed that increased bidialectalism (specifically, higher L2 use) was associated with faster irony processing. Moreover, better working memory resulted in faster ironic interpretations. Finally, ironic interpretations were processed as fast as literal meanings, at least in some experimental conditions. The latter result supports the direct access model of irony. We discuss our findings in the context of 2 accounts of multilingual pragmatics—namely, that multilinguals enjoy a pragmatic advantage and that they have a monolingual‐like pragmatic system.

Second language experience impacts first language irony comprehension among bilingual adults.

Recently, core components of irony processing (e.g., mental-state reasoning, executive control, and metalinguistic awareness) have been tentatively linked to bilingual experience. Thus, we investigated whether bilingual experience modulates irony comprehension during first language (L1) reading and also how bilingual adults comprehend irony in positive versus negative contexts (i.e., ironic compliments vs. criticisms, respectively). We deliver 3 main findings. First, bilinguals are faster at processing ironic criticisms than ironic compliments, and they find ironic criticisms more sensible than ironic compliments in their L1, much like past findings among monolinguals. Second, individual differences in bilingual experience modulate comprehension of ironic statements. Specifically, readers with high global second language (L2) proficiency find ironic statements more sensible than readers with low global L2 proficiency, regardless of the valence of the preceding context. Third, individual differences in global L2 proficiency further predict the speed of L1 irony comprehension: following a positive scenario, greater global L2 proficiency patterns with faster processing of irony compared to literal statements. Together, these data suggest that second language experience may be linked to irony processing in the first language. While the precise mechanism underlying this relationship remains open, potential sources may be rooted in flexible social cognition or executive functions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Processing of irony in text: A systematic review of eye-tracking studies.

Theoretical models of irony comprehension pose different hypotheses about the time course of resolving ironic interpretation of an utterance, and they propose several context-, phrase-, and reader-related factors that influence the ease or difficulty of processing irony. In recent years, these factors have been examined using eye tracking, which allows a detailed analysis of time course of reading processes. In this article, we present a meta-analysis of the eye-tracking studies on irony and then present a systematic review of the factors that have been shown to influence the time course of irony processing. The review will point to future directions in how eye tracking could best be applied to further develop the current theoretical views. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A Structural Equation Model Study on the Cognitive Factors of Irony Processing

Irony processing has always been a hot issue in experimental pragmatics. Existing studies have found out many cognitive factors contributing irony processing with unique paths and contribution rate of their own. Structural equation model can clearly demonstrate the exact path and contribution rate of each factor to irony processing, namely the need for cognition, empathy ability, sarcasm preference and working memory capacity. Three offline questionnaires on the need for cognition, empathy ability and sarcasm preference and two online tests of working memory capacity and irony processing have been conducted. Two hypotheses are verified through hierarchical linear modeling and structural equation modeling. Statistic results show that the four cognitive factors all exert positive effect on irony processing, with sarcasm preference exerting a direct effect while the need for cognition showing an indirect effect through the mediation of working memory capacity and empathy ability respectively, which is of great significance to the teaching of linguistics and rhetorics.

When is irony influenced by communicative constraints? ERP evidence supporting interactive models.

Distinct theoretical proposals have described how communicative constraints (contextual biases, speaker identity) impact verbal irony processing. Modular models assume that social and contextual factors have an effect at a late stage of processing. Interactive models claim that contextual biases are considered early on. The constraint-satisfaction model further assumes that speaker's and context's characteristics can compete at early stages of analysis. The present ERP study teased apart these models by testing the impact of context and speaker features (i.e., speaker accent) on irony analysis. Spanish native speakers were presented with Spanish utterances that were ironic or literal. Each sentence was preceded by a negative or a positive context. Each story was uttered in a native or a foreign accent. Results showed that contextual biases and speaker accent interacted as early as 150ms during irony processing. Greater N400-like effects were reported for ironic than literal sentences only with positive contexts and native accent, possibly suggesting semantic difficulties when non-prototypical irony was produced by natives. A P600 effect of irony was also reported indicating inferential processing costs. The results support the constraint-satisfaction model and suggest that multiple sources of information are weighted and can interact from the earliest stages of irony analysis.

Sarcasm between siblings: Children's use of relationship information in processing ironic remarks

We investigated whether children's appreciation of verbal irony is facilitated by the provision of speaker–addressee relationship information, namely that of a sibling relationship. We assessed both the product and process of children's interpretations to test whether children's processing of ironic remarks is better explained by sequential or interactive accounts of irony processing. Children (aged 5–8 years) viewed puppet shows in which the speaker and addressee were described either as siblings or as new acquaintances and the speaker made either an ironic or a literal remark. Using a variant of the visual world paradigm, participants were trained to make a motor response, selecting a response object to indicate whether they thought the speaker had a literal or an ironic intention. The timing of children's motor responses and their eye gaze to the response objects were tracked and analyzed. Results showed that sibling relationship information did not impact the accuracy of children's speaker intent judgments, but facilitated children's responding in the earliest stages of processing. We argue that these results are consistent with an interactive processing account of irony, by which cues to speaker intent are integrated early in the comprehension process.

A strong wink between verbal and emoji-based irony: How the brain processes ironic emojis during language comprehension.

Emojis are ideograms that are becoming ubiquitous in digital communication. However, no research has yet investigated how humans process semantic and pragmatic content of emojis in real time. We investigated neural responses to irony-producing emojis, the question being whether emoji-generated irony is processed similarly to word-generated irony. Previous ERP studies have routinely found P600 effects to verbal irony. Our research sought to identify whether the same neural responses could also be elicited by emoji-induced irony. In three experiments, participants read sentences that ended in either a congruent, incongruent, or ironic (wink) emoji. Results across all three experiments demonstrated clear P600 effects, the amplitudes of which were correlated with participants’ tendency to treat the emoji as a marker of irony, as indicated by behavioral comprehension question responses. These ironic wink emojis also elicited a strong P200 effect, also found in studies of verbal irony processing. Moreover, unexpected emojis (both mismatch and ironic emoji) also elicited late frontal positivities, which have been implicated processing unpredicted words in context. These results are the first to identify how linguistically-relevant ideograms are processed in real-time at the neural level, and specifically draw parallels between the processing of word- and emoji-induced irony.

Altered Neural Activity during Irony Comprehension in Unaffected First-Degree Relatives of Schizophrenia Patients-An fMRI Study.

Irony is a type of figurative language in which the literal meaning of the expression is the opposite of what the speaker intends to communicate. Even though schizophrenic patients are known as typically impaired in irony comprehension and in the underlying neural functions, to date no one has explored the neural correlates of figurative language comprehension in first-degree relatives of schizophrenic patients. In the present study, we examined the neural correlates of irony understanding in schizophrenic patients and in unaffected first-degree relatives of patients compared to healthy adults with functional MRI. Our aim was to investigate if possible alterations of the neural circuits supporting irony comprehension in first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia would fulfill the familiality criterion of an endophenotype. We examined 12 schizophrenic patients, 12 first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients and 12 healthy controls with functional MRI while they were performing irony and control tasks. Different phases of irony processing were examined, such as context processing and ironic statement comprehension. Patients had significantly more difficulty understanding irony than controls or relatives. Patients also showed markedly different neural activation pattern compared to controls in both stages of irony processing. Although no significant differences were found in the performance of the irony tasks between the control group and the relative group, during the fMRI analysis, the relatives showed stronger brain activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during the context processing phase of irony tasks than the control group. However, the controls demonstrated higher activations in the left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and in the right inferior frontal gyrus during the ironic statement phase of the irony tasks than the relative group. Our results show that despite good task performance, first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients had alterations in the neural circuits during irony processing. Thus, we suggest that neural alteration of irony comprehension could be a potential endophenotypic marker of schizophrenia.

When Sugar-Coated Words Taste Dry: The Relationship between Gender, Anxiety, and Response to Irony.

This article approaches the question of mocking compliments and ironic praise from an interactional gender perspective. A statement such as “You're a real genius!” could easily be interpreted as a literal compliment, as playful humor or as an offensive insult. We investigate this thin line in the use of irony among adult men and women. The research introduces an interactional approach to irony, through the lens of gender stereotype bias. The main question concerns the impact of individual differences and gender effect on the perception and production of ironic comments. Irony Processing Task (IPT), developed by Milanowicz (2016), was applied in order to study the production and perception of ironic criticism and ironic praise in adult males and females. It is a rare case of a study measuring the ability to create irony because, unlike most of known irony research, it is not a multiple choice test where participants are given the response options. The IPT was also used to assess the asymmetry of affect (humor vs. malice) and impact of gender effect in the perception of ironic comments. Results are analyzed in relation to the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) scores. The findings reveal the interactional relationship between gender and response to irony. Male responses were consistently more ironic than female's, across all experimental conditions, and female responses varied more. Both, men and women used more irony in response to male ironic criticism but female ironic praise. Anxiety proved to be a moderate predictor of irony comprehension and willingness to use irony. Data, collected in control and two gender stereotype activation conditions, also corroborates the assumption that the detection of compliments and the detection of criticism can be moderated by the attitude activation effect. The results are interpreted within the framework of linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) and natural selection strategies.

Alpha band event-related desynchronization underlying social situational context processing during irony comprehension: A magnetoencephalography source localization study

Irony comprehension requires integration of social contextual information. Previous studies have investigated temporal aspects of irony processing and its neural substrates using psychological/electroencephalogram or functional magnetic resonance imaging methods, but have not clarified the temporospatial neural mechanisms of irony comprehension. Therefore, we used magnetoencephalography to investigate the neural generators of alpha-band (8–13Hz) event-related desynchronization (ERD) occurring from 600 to 900ms following the onset of a critical sentence at which social situational contexts activated ironic representation. We found that the right anterior temporal lobe, which is involved in processing social knowledge and evaluating others’ intentions, exhibited stronger alpha ERD following an ironic statement than following a literal statement. We also found that alpha power in the left anterior temporal lobe correlated with the participants’ communication abilities. These results elucidate the temporospatial neural mechanisms of language comprehension in social contexts, including non-literal processing.

Medial prefrontal cortex stimulation modulates irony processing as indexed by the N400

ABSTRACTIn this study, we investigated whether the ERP responses observed during a verbal irony comprehension task might represent the cortical manifestation of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex (MPFC) activity. We performed a tDCS-EEG study in which we analyzed the effects of tDCS polarities (anode, cathode, sham) over the MPFC during a verbal irony task. We presented visual short stories portraying everyday situations followed by written statements in either an ironic or literal condition, whose meaning was referred to in the previous context. We manipulated the valence of the stimuli by presenting positive sentences or negative sentences in the ironic and literal conditions. The results revealed that the participants who received the anodal stimulation showed no differences in the N400 amplitude in response to the literal and the ironic condition. This could suggest that anodal stimulation has modulatory effects on N400 responses during irony comprehension. Our results indicated that the MPFC might be critical in accessing ironic information at the initial stage of irony comprehension. Finally, we found that the ironic compliments were more difficult to understand compared to the literal ones, suggesting that irony comprehension is affected by the valence of the information presented.