When irony is faster than its literal control: The role of mindreading during irony comprehension

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 2022
• Main Authors: Ronderos, Camilo R, Tomlinson, John M, Noveck, Ira
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cognitive science; Humanities and Social Sciences; Linguistics; Psychology
• ISSN: 0278-7393

Irony is a heavily context-dependent pragmatic phenomenon. But what is it about context that facilitates or blocks irony comprehension? Based on the echoic account, we suggest that a context facilitates irony comprehension when it makes manifest a speaker's intentions and attitude, i.e., when a context makes it easy for participants to engage their mindreading abilities. In two pre-registered self-paced reading experiments, we investigated the comprehension of sentences in English that could be understood as ironic or literal, according to the story frame that participants read leading to the target sentence. In Experiment 1, we found that when the story frames prevent participants from anticipating the speaker's intention, literal readings of critical sentences are-not surprisingly-faster than ironic ones. Importantly, when the story frames gave access to the speaker's intentions, we find cases in which ironic readings are actually faster than literal ones, resulting in a novel finding for the irony comprehension literature. Further, when the speaker was described as having a sincere attitude towards their utterance, participants tended to understand the utterances literally. They tended to understand them ironically when it was not clear what the speaker's attitude was. In Experiment 2 we investigated whether the findings of Experiment 1 could be linked to individual differences in participants' mindreading abilities. We found that participants who scored higher on a standard Theory of Mind task (the 'Reading the mind in the Eyes' task) were significantly more likely to derive ironic-but not literal-interpretations. We see these results as supporting the echoic account of irony comprehension. This work discusses the relevance of our findings to the long-standing debate on the processing effort of ironic vs. literal sentences.