Using context and prosody in irony understanding: Variability amongst individuals

Rivière, Elora; Klein, Madelyne; Champagne-Lavau, Maud

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2018.10.006

Cited by 26 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Assuming the hearer's perspective, the most powerful cue to detect the speaker's ironic intent is the incongruence between the context and the statement (see, a.o., Rivière et al, 2018), even if ironic compliments might require the presence of an explicit statement to be correctly perceived. To avoid misunderstandings, the ironic speaker can (but does not need to) also display the so-called ironic markers, that is, meta-communicative cues that alert the audience that his or her comment should not be interpreted literally.…”

Section: Verbal Ironymentioning

confidence: 99%

The atypical pattern of irony comprehension in autistic children

Panzeri

Mazzaggio

Giustolisi

et al. 2022

Applied Psycholinguistics

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Nonliteral language understanding has always been recognized as problematic in autistic individuals. We ran a study on 26 autistic children (mean age = 7.3 years) and 2 comparison groups of typically developing children, 1 matched for chronological age, and 1 of younger peers (mean age = 6.11 years) matched for linguistic abilities, aiming at assessing their understanding of ironic criticisms and compliments, and identifying the cognitive and linguistic factors that may underpin this ability. Autistic participants lagged behind the comparison groups in the comprehension of both types of irony, and their performance was related to mindreading and linguistic abilities. Significant correlations were found between first-order Theory of Mind (ToM) and both types of irony, between second-order ToM and ironic compliments, and between linguistic abilities and ironic criticisms. The autistic group displayed an interesting, and previously unattested in the literature, bimodal distribution: the great majority of them (n = 18) displayed a very poor performance in irony understanding, whereas some (n = 6) were at ceiling. We discuss these results in terms of two different profiles of autistic children.

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Section: Verbal Ironymentioning

confidence: 99%

The atypical pattern of irony comprehension in autistic children

Panzeri

Mazzaggio

Giustolisi

et al. 2022

Applied Psycholinguistics

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“…Understanding irony requires the integration of different types of contextual information. The perception of an incongruity between the context and the target statement is known to be an essential condition for understanding irony (Ivanko & Pexman, 2003; Kreuz & Glucksberg, 1989; Rivière, Klein, & Champagne-Lavau, 2018). Other markers, although not necessary, may also help (Attardo, 2000).…”

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confidence: 99%

Differential impairments in irony comprehension in brain-damaged individuals: Insight from contextual processing, theory of mind, and executive functions.

Cordonier¹,

Fossard²,

Champagne-Lavau³

2020

Neuropsychology

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Objective: The comprehension of irony can be affected after brain injuries. The cognitive mechanisms accounting for such disorders remain yet unclear. The heterogeneity of cognitive profiles of brain-damaged individuals and the use of independent tests to measure the links between these mechanisms and the comprehension of irony might contribute to this lack of clarity. The present study aimed to further explore the underlying mechanisms of irony understanding disorders (i.e., context processing, executive functions (EF), and theory of mind (ToM)) in patients with brain lesions. Method: We used a paradigm manipulating these mechanisms within an irony task to identify different patterns of pragmatic performance associated with cognitive profiles. We administered this task and standard neuropsychological tests assessing EF, and ToM to thirty acquired brain injured (ABI) and thirty healthy control (HC) participants. Results: A cluster analysis revealed that two-thirds of the ABI participants (3 subgroups out of 4) presented atypical pragmatic and neuropsychological patterns. The most severe disturbances in understanding irony, characterized by insensitivity to the context, were associated with a joint impairment on ToM and EF in one subgroup. In the two other context-sensitive subgroups, an isolated deficit in EF co-occurred with difficulties dealing with literal or ironic statements when the EF demand of the irony task was increased. However, the effect of this EF demand could be negated by the presence of markers helping the comprehension of irony. Conclusions: These results have important clinical implications for the evaluation and therapy of pragmatic disorders in ABI individuals.

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“…Moreover, Colston (2000) and Kumon-Nakamura et al, (1995) observed that when stories contain an allusion to a failed expectancy, positive evaluation (e.g., "this is great") of a negative outcome and negative evaluation (e.g., "this sucks") of a positive outcome were judged as more ironic than their literal counterparts. Other studies have shown that a larger contrast between expectations and reality increases the recognition of sarcasm and irony (Champagne-Lavau, Charest, et al, 2012;Champagne-Lavau, Cordonier, Bellmann, & Fossard, 2018;Deliens et al, 2018;Gerrig & Goldvarg, 2000;Ivanko & Pexman, 2003;Rivière, Klein, & Champagne-Lavau, 2018;Voyer et al, 2014;Woodland & Voyer, 2011) while the absence of incongruity between expectation and reality leads to interpreting the target utterance as sincere.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Which contextual and sociocultural information predict irony perception?

Rivière

Champagne-Lavau

2019

Discourse Processes

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The present study in French sought to investigate which factors predict irony perception most efficiently. An experiment was developed following three steps. The first two steps focused on the creation of stimuli to be evaluated in the third one. In the last step, participants, whose sociocultural characteristics (gender, age and level of education) were taken into account as factors, evaluated utterances according to their level of irony and the presence of contextual factors (i.e., allusion to a failed expectancy, negative tension and presence of a victim). The absence or presence of a lexical marker in the utterances was also a controlled factor. The main results revealed contextual factors as the strongest predictors of irony perception but also pointed out the not inconsiderable role played by the sociocultural factors (gender and level of education) of the participants.

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Using context and prosody in irony understanding: Variability amongst individuals

Cited by 26 publications

References 34 publications

The atypical pattern of irony comprehension in autistic children

The atypical pattern of irony comprehension in autistic children

Differential impairments in irony comprehension in brain-damaged individuals: Insight from contextual processing, theory of mind, and executive functions.

Which contextual and sociocultural information predict irony perception?

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