Investigating sarcasm comprehension using eye-tracking during reading: What are the roles of literality, familiarity, and echoic mention? (original) (raw)
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An Eye-Tracking Investigation of Written Sarcasm Comprehension: The Roles of Familiarity and Context
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2016
This article addresses a current theoretical debate between the standard pragmatic model, the graded salience hypothesis, and the implicit display theory, by investigating the roles of the context and of the properties of the sarcastic utterance itself in the comprehension of a sarcastic remark. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted where we manipulated the speaker’s expectation in the context and the familiarity of the sarcastic remark. The results of the first eye-tracking study showed that literal comments were read faster than unfamiliar sarcastic comments, regardless of whether an explicit expectation was present in the context. The results of the second eye-tracking study indicated an early processing difficulty for unfamiliar sarcastic comments, but not for familiar sarcastic comments. Later reading time measures indicated a general difficulty for sarcastic comments. Overall, results seem to suggest that the familiarity of the utterance does indeed affect the time course of sarcasm processing (supporting the graded salience hypothesis), although there is no evidence that making the speaker’s expectation explicit in the context affects it as well (thus failing to support the implicit display theory).
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2020
This paper addresses a current theoretical debate between modular and interactive accounts of sarcasm processing, by investigating the role of context (specifically, knowing that a character has been sarcastic before) in the comprehension of a sarcastic remark. An eye- tracking experiment was conducted where participants were asked to read texts that introduced a character as being either sarcastic or not, and ended in either a literal or an unfamiliar sarcastic remark. The results indicated that when the character was previously literal, a subsequent sarcastic remark was more difficult to process than its literal counterpart. However, when the context was supportive of the sarcastic interpretation (i.e., the character was known to be sarcastic), subsequent sarcastic remarks were as easy to read as literal equivalents, which would support the predictions of interactive accounts. Importantly, this effect was not preceded by a main effect of literality, which constitutes evidence against the predictions of modular accounts.
Metaphor & Symbol, 2018
Theorists have debated whether our ability to understand sarcasm (pertaining here to verbal irony) is principally determined by the context or by properties of the comment itself. The current research investigated an alternative view that broadens the focus on the comment itself, suggesting that mitigating a highly positive concept by using negation generates sarcastic interpretations by default. In the current study, pretests performed on the target utterances presented in isolation established their default interpretations; novel affirmative phrases (e.g., "He is the best lawyer") were interpreted literally, whereas equally novel negative counterparts (e.g., "He isn’t the best lawyer") were interpreted sarcastically. In Experiment 1 (an eye-tracking study), prior context biased these utterances toward literal or sarcastic interpretations. Results showed that target utterances were easier to process in contexts supporting their default interpretations, regardless of affirmation/negation. Results from a second eye-tracking experiment sug- gested that readers’ tendency to interpret negative phrases sarcastically is related to their own tendency to use malicious humor. Our findings suggest that negation leads to certain ambiguous utterances receiving sarcastic interpretations by default and that this process may be further intensified by personality factors.
Lexical influences on the perception of sarcasm
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Figurative Language - FigLanguages '07, 2007
Speakers and listeners make use of a variety of pragmatic factors to produce and identify sarcastic statements. It is also possible that lexical factors play a role, although this possibility has not been investigated previously. College students were asked to read excerpts from published works that originally contained the phrase said sarcastically, although the word sarcastically was deleted. The participants rated the characters' statements in these excerpts as more likely to be sarcastic than those from similar excerpts that did not originally contain the word sarcastically. The use of interjections, such as gee or gosh, predicted a significant amount of the variance in the participants' ratings of sarcastic intent. This outcome suggests that sarcastic statements may be more formulaic than previously realized. It also suggests that computer software could be written to recognize such lexical factors, greatly increasing the likelihood that nonliteral intent could be correctly interpreted by such programs, even if they are unable to identify the pragmatic components of nonliteral language.
Brain Sciences
Understanding sarcasm is a complex ability, which includes several processes. Previous studies demonstrated the possible roles of linguistic and meta-representative factors in understanding sarcasm in school children, while the influence of specific contextual variables still needs to be investigated. Here, we present two studies investigating the possible role of contextual, linguistics, and meta-representative factors in understanding sarcasm in school children. In Study 1, we investigated sarcasm comprehension in 8–9-year-old school children in three different contexts, in which both familiarity and authority were manipulated. We found that understanding sarcasm was facilitated when the conversational partner was characterized by a high level of authority and familiarity (the mother) rather than when the conversational partner was an adult with a lower level of both authority and familiarity (the cashier of a food store). In Study 2, we replicated and extended Study 1 by investig...
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2020
We present an eye-tracking experiment examining moment-to-moment processes underlying the comprehension of emoticons. Younger (18–30) and older (65+) participants had their eye movements recorded while reading scenarios containing comments that were ambiguous between literal or sarcastic interpretations (e.g., But you’re so quick though). Comments were accompanied by wink emoticons or full stops. Results showed that participants read earlier parts of the wink scenarios faster than those with full stops, but then spent more time reading the text surrounding the emoticon. Thus, readers moved more quickly to the end of the text when there was a device that may aid interpretation but then spent more time processing the conflict between the superficially positive nature of the comment and the tone implied by the emoticon. Interestingly, the wink increased the likelihood of a sarcastic interpretation in younger adults only, suggesting that perceiver-related factors play an important role in emoticon interpretation.
The case of default sarcastic interpretations
2018
What are the constraints rendering stimuli, such as Alert he is not; He is not the most organized person around; Hospitality is not his best attribute; Do you really believe you are sophisticated? sarcastic by default? Recent findings (Filik, Howman, Ralph-Nearman, & Giora, in press; Giora et al., 2005, 2013, 2015a, 2015b, in progress a) suggest that strongly attenuating a highly positive concept, e.g., alert, sophisticated, most organized, best attribute (associated here with hospitality), induces sarcastic interpretations by default. To be interpreted sarcastically by default, items should be construable as such in the absence of factors inviting sarcasm. 1 They should, thus, be (i) novel, noncoded in the mental lexicon, (ii) potentially ambiguous between literal and nonliteral interpretations, so that a preference is allowed, and (iii) free of specific and biasing contextual information. Online and offline studies, collecting self-paced reading times, eye-tracking data during reading, sarcasm rating, and pleasure ratings, alongside corpus-based studies, further support this view. 2
Default Sarcastic Interpretations: On the Priority of Nonsalient Interpretations
Discourse Processes, 2014
Findings from five experiments support the view that negation generates sarcastic utterance-interpretations by default. 1 When presented in isolation, novel negative constructions ("Punctuality is not his forte," "Thoroughness is not her most distinctive feature"), free of semantic anomaly or internal incongruity, were interpreted sarcastically and rated as sarcastic compared to their novel affirmative counterparts (Experiments 1 and 3). In strongly supportive contexts, they were processed faster when biased toward their noncoded (nonsalient) sarcastic interpretation than toward their noncoded but (salience-based) literal interpretation (Experiments 2 and 4). Experiment 5 reduces the possibility that it is structural markedness rather than negation that prompts nonliteralness. Such findings, attesting to the priority of sarcastic interpretations, are unaccountable by any contemporary processing model, including the Graded Salience Hypothesis.
Sarcasm and emoticons: Comprehension and emotional impact
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2016
Most theorists agree that sarcasm serves some communicative function that would not be achieved by speaking directly, such as eliciting a particular emotional response in the recipient. One debate concerns whether this kind of language serves to enhance or mute the positive or negative nature of a message. The role of textual devices commonly used to accompany written sarcastic remarks is also unclear. The current research uses a rating task to investigate the influence of textual devices (emoticons and punctuation marks) on the comprehension of, and emotional responses to, sarcastic versus literal criticism and praise, for both unambiguous (Experiment 1) and ambiguous (Experiment 2) materials. Results showed that sarcastic criticism was rated as less negative than literal criticism, and sarcastic praise was rated as less positive than literal praise, suggesting that sarcasm serves to mute the positive or negative nature of the message. In terms of textual devices, results showed that emoticons had a larger influence on both comprehension and emotional impact than punctuation marks.
Processing of Written Irony: An Eye Movement Study
Discourse Processes, 2014
We examined processing of written irony by recording readers' eye movements while they read target phrases embedded either in ironic or non-ironic story context. After reading each story, participants responded to a text memory question and an inference question tapping into the understanding of the meaning of the target phrase. The results of Experiment 1 (N = 52) showed that readers were more likely to reread ironic than non-ironic target sentences during first-pass reading as well as during later look-backs. Experiment 2 (N = 60) examined individual differences related to working memory capacity (WMC), Sarcasm Self-Report Scale (SSS), and need for cognition (NFC) in the processing of irony. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that WMC, but not SSS or NFC, plays a role in how readers resolve the meaning of ironic utterances. High WMC was related to increased probability of initiating first-pass rereadings in ironic compared with literal sentences. The results of these two experiments suggest that the processing of (unconventional) irony does require extra processing effort and that the effects are localized in the ironic utterances.