Processing of Written Irony: An Eye Movement Study

An eye-tracking investigation of written sarcasm comprehension: The roles of familiarity and context.

“…In other words, it seems that we failed to support the prediction that increasing the degree of manifestness of the speaker’s expectation in the context offers an initial processing advantage for sarcastic utterances. These results are in line with those of previous studies of irony processing that report a literality effect (e.g., Filik et al, 2014 for unfamiliar ironies; Filik & Moxey, 2010; Giora, 1995; Giora et al, 1998, 2007; Kaakinen et al, 2014). …”

“…In a typical experiment, participants would be presented with scenarios that would end in an utterance that could be interpreted as either literal or sarcastic. On the one hand, evidence from self-paced reading studies (e.g., Giora, 1995; Giora, Fein, & Schwartz, 1998; Spotorno & Noveck, 2014), and eye-tracking studies (e.g., Filik & Moxey, 2010; Kaakinen, Olkoniemi, Kinnari, & Hyönä, 2014) showing that sarcasm comprehension takes longer than literal language comprehension, has been taken to support modular accounts. Other evidence showing that sarcasm can be comprehended as fast as literal language, again from self-paced reading (e.g., Gibbs, 1986), and additionally from visual-world paradigm studies (e.g., Kowatch, Whalen, & Pexman, 2013), has been taken as support for more interactive accounts.…”

The influence of a reading task on children’s eye movements during reading

“…Different sentence-level measures reflect different types of cognitive processes: forward fixation time reflects the initial processing of the sentence, whereas first-pass reinspections tap into the integrative processing of the sentence content to the developing memory representation of the text (Kaakinen & Hyönä, 2005; for importance of regressions for comprehension, see Schotter, Tran, & Rayner, 2014;van der Schoot, Vasbinder, Horsley, & Van Lieshout, 2008). Look-backs, on the other hand, are strategic in nature (Hyönä & Nurminen, 2006), and they reflect the conscious effort of refreshing text information in working memory in order to incorporate it to the text representation (Kaakinen & Hyönä, 2005) or in order to resolve a coherence break introduced by the sentence (Kaakinen, Olkoniemi, Kinnari, & Hyönä, 2014).…”

Default Sarcastic Interpretations: On the Priority of Nonsalient Interpretations

“…They show that the interpretation of non-conventionalized sarcastic remarks depends primarily on contextual information and is harder to process than when intended literally. This is true even when a strongly supportive context is provided (e.g., Fein, Yeari, & Giora, 2015;Filik, Leuthold, Wallington, & Page, 2014;Filik & Moxey, 2010;Giora, 2003;Giora & Fein, 1999;Giora, Fein, & Schwartz, 1998;Giora, Fein, Kaufman, Eisenberg, & Erez, 2009;Giora et al, 2007;Kaakinen, Olkoniemi, Kinnari, & Hyönä, 2014;Pexman, Ferretti, & Katz, 2000). Only one study suggests that when embedded in strongly supportive contexts, novel utterances take equally long to process, regardless of whether they are intended literally or sarcastically (Gibbs, 1986b; but see Giora, 1995, for a critique).…”