Irony: Context accessibility and processing effort

Stylistic and Contextual Effects in Irony Processing

Irony is perceived through a complex interaction between an utterance and its context and serves many social functions such as to be sarcastic and to be humorous. The purpose of this paper is to explore what role linguistic style and contextual information play in the recognition of irony (i.e., assessing the degree of irony) and in the appreciation of ironic functions (i.e., assessing the degr...

Understanding irony in autism : The role of context and prosody

Comprehension and Hemispheric Processing of Irony in Schizophrenia

Studies focusing on the comprehension of figurative language among schizophrenia patients (SZ) reveal their difficulties comprehending such language and their tendency to interpret it literally. The present study investigated hemispheric processing and comprehension of irony in 16 SZ patients and 18 typically developing (TD) adults. Two experimental tasks were used: an online divided visual fie...

What’s behind a P600? Integration Operations during Irony Processing

The combined knowledge of word meanings and grammatical rules does not allow a listener to grasp the intended meaning of a speaker's utterance. Pragmatic inferences on the part of the listener are also required. The present work focuses on the processing of ironic utterances (imagine a slow day being described as "really productive") because these clearly require the listener to go beyond the l...

Does the Effort of Processing Potential Incentives Influence the Adaption of Context Updating in Older Adults?

A number of aging studies suggest that older adults process positive and negative information differently. For instance, the socioemotional selectivity theory postulates that older adults preferably process positive information in service of emotional well-being (Reed and Carstensen, 2012). Moreover, recent research has started to investigate whether incentives like gains or losses can influenc...