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

Complain like you mean it! How prosody conveys suffering even about innocuous events

When complaining, speakers can use their voice to convey a feeling of pain, even when describing innocuous events. Rapid detection of emotive and identity features of the voice may constrain how the semantic content of complaints is processed, as indexed by N400 and P600 effects evoked by the final, pain-related word. Twenty-six participants listened to statements describing painful and innocuous events expressed in a neutral or complaining voice, produced by ingroup and outgroup accented speakers. Participants evaluated how hurt the speaker felt under EEG monitoring. Principal Component Analysis of Event-Related Potentials from the final word onset demonstrated N400 and P600 increases when complainers described innocuous vs. painful events in a neutral voice, but these effects were altered when utterances were expressed in a complaining voice. Independent of prosody, N400 amplitudes increased for complaints spoken in outgroup vs. ingroup accents. Results demonstrate that prosody and accent constrain the processing of spoken complaints as proposed in a parallel-constraint-satisfaction model.

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

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.

Sarcasm use in Turkish: The roles of personality, age, gender, and self-esteem

This study examined how self-reported sarcasm use is related to individual differences in non-Western adults. A sample of 329 Turkish speakers of high socioeconomic status completed an online survey including measures of self-reported sarcasm use, personality traits, positive and negative affect, self-presentation styles, self-esteem, as well as age and gender. Participants who reported being more likely to use sarcasm in social situations had scores indicating that they were less agreeable, less conscientious, and less emotional stable (i.e., more neurotic). Also, those who reported using sarcasm more often tended to be younger and had lower self-esteem. Self-reported sarcasm use was also positively related to both the self-promoting and the self-depreciating presentation styles. In addition to highlighting the complex relationship between individual differences and language production, these findings underscore the importance of expanding sarcasm research to include non-Western samples.

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

Objective

Irony 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 methods

Three 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.

Results

Compared 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.

Conclusion

In 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 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.

I was being sarcastic!: The effect of foreign accent and political ideology on irony (mis)understanding

Misunderstood ironic intents may injure the conversation and impede connecting with others. Prior research suggests that ironic compliments, a rarer type of irony, are considered less ironic when spoken with a foreign accent. Using more ecologically-valid stimuli with natural prosodic cues, we found that this effect also applied to ironic criticisms, not just to ironic compliments. English native speakers (N = 96) listened to dialogs between Canadian English speakers and their foreign-accented peers, rating targets on multiple scales (irony, certainty in the speaker's intent, appropriateness, and offensiveness). Generalized additive mixed modelling showed that 1) ironic comments were rated lower for irony when foreign-accented, whereas literal comments were unaffected by accent; 2) the listener's political orientation, but not empathy or need for cognitive closure, modulated irony detection accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of linguistic expectations, social distance, cultural stereotypes, and personality differences.

Electrophysiological correlates of conventional metaphor, irony, and literal language processing - An event-related potentials and eLORETA study

Conventional metaphor, irony, and literal language processing were compared. Thirty right-handed participants (21-34 years) performed a sequential-statement ERP-paradigm. A left-frontal Late Anterior Negative Slow Wave (LANSW, 450-1000 ms) was significantly greater for metaphors and by visual tendency greater for irony, compared to literal statements. A centroparietal N400 (300-450 ms) and a centroparietal right-dominant "Late N400" (450-600 ms) were by statistical and visual tendency greater for metaphors. Left PCC and left lingual gyrus activity was significantly higher in metaphors compared to literal statements (eLORETA; 450-1000 ms). A statistical trend indicated higher parahippocampal gyrus activity in metaphors and ironies. N400 results are discussed considering changing processing techniques and a renewed semantic conflict. The Late N400 was associated with the construct of "associativeness". The LANSW was related to metaphorical mapping, frame-shifting processes, integration of meanings, and memory processes. eLORETA results were discussed considering metaphorical mapping, creation of mental images, conventionality, valence, memory processes, and divergent thinking.

Pragmatics Always Matters: An Expanded Vision of Experimental Pragmatics

Much of the work in experimental pragmatics is devoted to testing empirical hypotheses that arise within the study of linguistic and philosophical pragmatics. The focus in much of this work is focused on those aspects of communicated meaning that are “inferred” rather than understood through linguistic “coding” processes. Under this view, pragmatic meanings emerge secondarily after purely linguistic meanings are accessed or computed. Our aim in this article is to greatly broaden the scope of experimental pragmatic studies by calling for much greater emphasis on the complete pragmatics of language use. Pragmatics is continuously present and constrains people’s real-time production and processing of language in context. Experimental pragmatics should attend more to the particularities of pragmatic experience through closer examination of the people we study, the specific tasks used to assess understanding, as well as the actual complex meanings people interpret in diverse contexts. The many specifics of human pragmatics demand the study and theoretical inclusion of many bodily, linguistic, and situational factors that make up each instance of meaning making.