Looking more and at different things: Differential gender eye-tracking patterns on an irony comprehension task.

Abstract

Irony is a well-studied figurative form of communication that requires the interpretation of the pragmatic aspects of language and ability to infer another’s mental state. Currently, the models that have been created to explain the process of verbal irony are not unanimous, which could be because of the choice of stimulus materials (written and auditory sentences). In real-life situations, a verbal irony statement is placed in a social context with multiple sources of cues that help integrate the correct meaning. Another important issue in verbal irony studies involves sex differences that are observed in the frequent use of this figurative form of communication. Again, the integration of social cues could constitute the core of these differences. Thus, we investigated the way in which these cues are integrated when participants are presented with an ironic statement and the way in which the integration of these cues can affect sex differences in the use of this complex form of communication. We constructed 20 sequences of cartoons that portrayed ironic and literal situations. Each situation had 3 cues, called areas of interest (i.e., facial expression, written commentary, and pictorial cue). We analyzed eye-movement patterns among genders, indexed by the duration and number of fixations and sequence of fixations for each scenario. Our results indicated that although women presented an increase in the number of fixations compared with men, both genders presented similar behavioral performance in the task. We found that both genders were equally capable of grasping the ironic meaning. Therefore, both genders were equally capable of inferring another’s mental state using different strategies.

The role of look-backs in the processing of written sarcasm

“…However, only a few studies have examined gender differences in the comprehension of sarcasm, and most have failed to find evidence for gender differences (Baptista, Macedo, & Boggio, 2015; see also Holtgraves, 1997). However, it has been suggested that the processing strategies used to understand irony might differ between men and women (Baptista et al, 2015) and that women might be better in recognizing sarcasm (Rothermich & Pell, 2015). Thus, the potential gender effects should be taken into account in the future.…”

Individual difference on reading ability tested by eye-tracking: from perspective of gender

“…Other researchers looked at individual differences in eye movements between male and female readers (Yang et al, 2014). Gender differences have been found in visual attention (Huang et al, 2014), discourse bias for pronoun interpretation (Arnold, 2015), exploratory eye movements of normal subjects (Miyahira et al, 2000), eye-tracking patterns in an irony comprehension task (Baptista et al, 2015) and eye movements in solving text-and-diagram science problems (Huang and Chen, 2015). In addition, the word frequency effect is also widely reported.…”

Do They Really Mean It? Children’s Inference of Speaker Intentions and the Role of Age and Gender

“…Some studies have shown an advantage for girls in emotion perception and in tasks requiring the identification of social intentions (Bosacki, 2000; Hughes & Dunn, 1998; Lee, 2013; McClure, 2000; McDonald et al, 2015). Research on gender differences has yielded mixed findings (e.g., Baptista, Macedo, & Boggio, 2015; Holtgraves, 1997; Rothermich & Pell, 2015); although some research has shown that males and females are equally capable of understanding nonliteral speech (e.g., Baptista et al, 2015; Holtgraves, 1997), other research has shown there are dissimilarities (e.g., Rothermich & Pell, 2015). Moreover, Baptista and colleagues (2015) demonstrated that although there were no gender differences in the comprehension of irony, female participants spent more time fixating on an ironic comic and take more time to understand the situation compared to males.…”

“…Research on gender differences has yielded mixed findings (e.g., Baptista, Macedo, & Boggio, 2015; Holtgraves, 1997; Rothermich & Pell, 2015); although some research has shown that males and females are equally capable of understanding nonliteral speech (e.g., Baptista et al, 2015; Holtgraves, 1997), other research has shown there are dissimilarities (e.g., Rothermich & Pell, 2015). Moreover, Baptista and colleagues (2015) demonstrated that although there were no gender differences in the comprehension of irony, female participants spent more time fixating on an ironic comic and take more time to understand the situation compared to males. Thus, we expect that some of the variance in our study can be explained by gender differences, which also was observed in a study of young adults using the same video database (Rothermich & Pell, 2015).…”