When is irony influenced by communicative constraints? ERP evidence supporting interactive models

Abstract

Distinct theoretical proposals have described how communicative constraints (contextual biases, speaker identity) impact verbal irony processing. Modular models assume that social and contextual factors have an effect at a late stage of processing. Interactive models claim that contextual biases are considered early on. The constraint‐satisfaction model further assumes that speaker's and context's characteristics can compete at early stages of analysis. The present ERP study teased apart these models by testing the impact of context and speaker features (i.e., speaker accent) on irony analysis. Spanish native speakers were presented with Spanish utterances that were ironic or literal. Each sentence was preceded by a negative or a positive context. Each story was uttered in a native or a foreign accent. Results showed that contextual biases and speaker accent interacted as early as 150 ms during irony processing. Greater N400‐like effects were reported for ironic than literal sentences only with positive contexts and native accent, possibly suggesting semantic difficulties when non‐prototypical irony was produced by natives. A P600 effect of irony was also reported indicating inferential processing costs. The results support the constraint‐satisfaction model and suggest that multiple sources of information are weighted and can interact from the earliest stages of irony analysis.

The roles of social status information in irony comprehension: An eye-tracking study

“…The result was similar to a two-stage processing pattern, and the parallel Constraint-Satisfaction Model might be taken into more consideration. In some ERP studies, the comprehension of irony might involve N400- or P600-like (late positivity) effects, where the N400 effect was usually interpreted as the semantic integration between context and literal meaning, while P600 might refer to the pragmatic inference of the ironic intent ( Cornejo et al, 2007 ; Regel et al, 2011 ; Spotorno et al, 2013 ; Filik et al, 2014 ; Caffarra et al, 2019 ; Mauchand et al, 2021 ). Despite the fact that the literality and the social status effect occurred in different regions in the current study, the time course of literality and status processing was similar in principle to the N400 and P600 effects found in previous studies.…”

Immediate online use of prosody reveals the ironic intentions of a speaker: neurophysiological evidence

“…Rather, the immediate on-line uptake and structuring of prosodic cues (especially sarcastic prosody) can point directly to nonliteral meanings, allowing listeners to predict and constrain a representation of the speaker's ironic intent as a "best fit" solution (Gibbs, 2002). This process is best captured by the parallelconstraint satisfaction model (Katz et al, 2004;Pexman, 2008), which is receiving increasing support (Caffarra et al, 2019;Deliens et al, 2018;Kowatch et al, 2013;Spotorno et al, 2013). When prosodic cues are salient and continuously processed, initial representations of ironic intent appear to facilitate linguistic processing which does not require pragmatic reinterpretation, although these operations are somewhat altered for less prototypical, negative statements communicating irony.…”

“…Saying "You're such a lousy driver" to a friend who is clearly very good implies an intent to playfully compliment, not to criticize. Despite similarities in structure, the intent of ironic compliments does not seem to be recognized as accurately as ironic criticisms or processed in the same manner (Bruntsch & Ruch, 2017;Caillies et al, 2019;Caffarra et al, 2019). This may be due to the "asymmetry of affect" (Matthews, Hancock, & Dunham, 2006;Pexman & Olineck, 2002).…”

“…Given ERP evidence that social distance has important impacts on neural processing (Katz, Blasko, & Kazmerski, 2004;Perry, Rubinsten, Peled, & Shamay-Tsoory, 2013;Yu, Hu, & Zhang, 2015), this factor should be operationalized in future studies of how listeners apprehend and process ironic intentions. Moreover, in light of findings showing that a speaker's communicative style (Regel et al, 2010) or linguistic background (Caffarra et al, 2019) influence how the brain processes irony, future studies should continue to address speaker identity issues (e.g., responses towards voices of familiar and unfamiliar speakers) while accounting for prosody effects.…”

Pragmatics Always Matters: An Expanded Vision of Experimental Pragmatics

“…But it seems unlikely that replication efforts will somehow clean up this catalog of experimental findings to reveal a simple, comprehensive set of data which clearly points to one theoretical model of irony understanding that can be applied to all people in all situations of verbal irony use. Nonetheless, the various, sometimes complex patterns of experimental results may highlight different systems of constraint that flexibly operate to produce relevant irony interpretations in different task-specific and people-specific contexts (e.g., constraint-satisfaction models, see Campbell and Katz, 2012;Caffarra et al, 2019).…”