We explored the differential impact of auditory information and written contextual information on the recognition of verbal irony in spontaneous speech. Based on relevance theory, we predicted that speakers would provide acoustic disambiguation cues when speaking in situations that lack other sources of information, such as a visual channel. We further predicted that listeners would use this in...

The role of repression in the incidence of ironic errors was investigated on a golf task. Coping styles of novice golfers were determined using measures of cognitive anxiety and physiological arousal. Following baseline putts, participants (n = 58) performed a competition putt with the opportunity to win UK£50 (approx. US$100). Before completing the competition putt participants were instructed...

Higher levels of discourse processing evoke patterns of cognition and brain activation that extend beyond the literal comprehension of sentences. We used fMRI to examine brain activation patterns while 16 healthy participants read brief three-sentence stories that concluded with either a literal, metaphoric, or ironic sentence. The fMRI images acquired during the reading of the critical sentenc...

We describe a data collection for vocal expression of ironic utterances and anger based on an Android app that was specifically developed for this study. The main aim of the investigation is to find evidence for a non-verbal expression of irony. A data set of 937 utterances was collected and labeled by six listeners for irony and anger. The automatically recognized textual content was labeled f...

Irony is an effective but challenging mode of communication that allows a speaker to express sentiment-rich viewpoints with concision, sharpness and humour. Irony is especially common in online documents that express subjective and deeply-felt opinions, and thus represents a significant obstacle to the accurate analysis of sentiment in web texts. In this paper we look at one commonly used frami...

The main goal of the present study was to characterise the social cognition abilities of French children with ADHD, in terms of their understanding of people's recursive mental states and their irony comprehension. We hypothesised that these children have difficulty understanding second-order false beliefs and ironic remarks, owing to the executive dysfunction that is characteristic of ADHD. We...

A variety of classification approaches for the detection of ironic or sarcastic messages has been proposed in the last decade to improve sentiment classification. However, despite the availability of psychologically and linguistically motivated theories regarding the di↵erence between irony and sarcasm, these typically do not carry over to a use in predictive models; one reason might be that th...

Research on verbal irony has found that prosodic features such as pitch range expansion, syllable lengthening, and specific intonational contours are common prosodic resources that languages use to mark irony in speech. Yet little is known about the relative weight of these prosodic features in the detection of irony in languages that use these three prosodic correlates. In this paper we presen...