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

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 versus literal sentences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Slowdowns in scalar implicature processing: Isolating the intention-reading costs in the Bott & Noveck task.

An underinformative sentence, such as Some cats are mammals, is trivially true with a semantic (some and perhaps all) reading of the quantifier and false with a pragmatic (some but not all) one, with the latter reliably resulting in longer response times than the former in a truth evaluation task (Bott & Noveck, 2004). Most analyses attribute these prolonged reaction times, or costs, to the steps associated with the derivation of the scalar implicature. In the present work we investigate, across three experiments, whether such slowdowns can be attributed (at least partly) to the participant's need to adjust to the speaker's informative intention. In Experiment 1, we designed a web-based version of Bott & Noveck's (2004) laboratory task that would most reliably provide its classic results. In Experiment 2 we found that over the course of an experimental session, participants' pragmatic responses to underinformative sentences are initially reliably long and ultimately comparable to response times of logical interpretations to the same sentences. Such results cannot readily be explained by assuming that implicature derivation is a consistent source of processing effort. In Experiment 3, we further tested our account by examining how response times change as a function of the number of people said to produce the critical utterances. When participants are introduced (via a photo and description) to a single 'speaker', the results are similar to those found in Experiment 2. However, when they are introduced to two 'speakers', with the second 'speaker' appearing midway (after five encounters with underinformative items), we found a significant uptick in pragmatic response latencies to the underinformative item right after participants' meet their second speaker (i.e. at their sixth encounter with an underinformative item). Overall, we interpret these results as suggesting that at least part of the cost typically attributed to the derivation of a scalar implicature is actually a consequence of how participants think about the informative intentions of the person producing the underinformative sentences.

Anticipating the Damn Referent: How Comprehenders Rapidly Retrieve the Speaker's Attitude When Processing Negative Expressive Adjectives.

Theoretical accounts of negative expressives such as damn have ascribed two main properties to this type of adjective, namely that they are typically speaker-oriented, and that they can be flexible with regard to their syntactic attachment. However, it is not clear what this means during online sentence processing. For example, is it effortful for comprehenders to derive the speaker's negative attitude conveyed by an expressive adjective, or is it a rapid, automatic process? And do comprehenders understand the speaker's attitude regardless of the expressive's syntactic position? The current work provides the first evidence supporting theoretical claims by investigating the incremental processing of Italian negative expressive adjectives. In an eye-tracking study, we show that expressive content is rapidly integrated with information about the speaker's attitude, resulting in the anticipation of an upcoming referent, regardless of the expressive's syntactic realization. We argue that comprehenders use expressives as an ostensive cue that allows for automatic retrieval of the speaker's negative attitude.

Suppression of literal meaning in single and extended metaphors.

Within Relevance Theory, it has been suggested that extended metaphors might be processed differently relative to single metaphoric uses. While single metaphors are hypothesized to be understood via the creation of an ad hoc concept, extended metaphors have been claimed to require a switch to a secondary processing mode, which gives greater prominence to the literal meaning. Initial experimental evidence has supported a distinction by showing differences in reading times between single and extended metaphors. However, beyond potential differences in comprehension speed, Robyn Carston's 'lingering of the literal' account seems to predict qualitative differences in the interpretative mechanisms involved. In the present work, we test the hypothesis that during processing of extended metaphors, the mechanisms of enhancement and suppression of activation levels of literal-related features operate differently relative to single metaphors. We base our work on a study by Paula Rubio-Fernández, which showed that processing single metaphors involves suppressing features related exclusively to the literal meaning of the metaphoric vehicle after 1000 milliseconds of encountering the metaphor. Our goal was to investigate whether suppression is also involved in the comprehension of extended metaphors, or whether the 'lingering of the literal' leads to continued activation of literal-related features, as we take Carston's account to predict. We replicate existing results, in as much as we find that activation levels of literal-related features are reduced after 1000 milliseconds. Critically, we also show that the pattern of suppression does not hold for extended metaphors, for which literal-related features remain activated after 1000 milliseconds. We see our results as providing support for Carston's view that extended metaphor processing involves a prominent role of literal meaning, contributing towards explicating the links between theoretical predictions within Relevance Theory and online sentence processing.

What second-language speakers can tell us about pragmatic processing.

Upon hearing the phrase Some cats meow, a listener might pragmatically infer that 'Some but not all cats meow'. This is known as a scalar implicature and it often arises when a speaker produces a weak linguistic expression instead of a stronger one. Several L2 studies claim that pragmatic inferences are generated by default and their comprehension presents no challenges to L2 learners. However, the evidence obtained from these studies largely stems from offline-based tasks that provide limited information about how scalar implicatures are processed. This study investigated scalar implicature processing among L2 speakers of English and the degree to which differences in L2 proficiency and Theory of Mind abilities would modulate pragmatic responding. The experiment used an online sentence verification paradigm that required participants to judge, among multiple control items, the veracity of under-informative sentences, such as Some cats are mammals, and to respond as quickly as possible. A true response to this item is indicative of a logical some and perhaps all reading and a false response to a pragmatic some but not all reading. Our results showed evidence that scalar inferences are not generated by default. The answer linked to the pragmatic reading some but not all took significantly longer to make relative to the answer that relies on the logical interpretation some and perhaps all. This processing slowdown was also significantly larger among participants with lower English proficiency. Further exploratory analyses of participants' Theory of Mind, as measured by the Social Skill subscale in the Autism Spectrum Quotient, revealed that socially inclined participants are more likely than the socially disinclined to derive a scalar inference. These results together provide new empirical insights into how L2 learners process scalar implicatures and thus implications for processing theories in experimental pragmatics and second language acquisition.

Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods.

In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center "Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation" (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define "register" as recurring variation in language use depending on the function of language and on the social situation. Informed by rich data, we aim to better understand and model the knowledge involved in situation- and function-based use of language register. In order to achieve this goal, we are using complementary methods and measures. In the review, we start by clarifying the concept of "register", by reviewing the state of the art, and by setting out our methods and modeling goals. Against this background, we discuss three key challenges, two at the methodological level and one at the theoretical level: (1) To better uncover registers in text and spoken corpora, we propose changes to established analytical approaches. (2) To tease apart between-subject variability from the linguistic variability at issue (intra-individual situation-based register variability), we use within-subject designs and the modeling of individuals' social, language, and educational background. (3) We highlight a gap in cognitive modeling, viz. modeling the mental representations of register (processing), and present our first attempts at filling this gap. We argue that the targeted use of multiple complementary methods and measures supports investigating the pervasiveness of register phenomena and yields comprehensive insights into the cross-methodological robustness of register-related language variability. These comprehensive insights in turn provide a solid foundation for associated cognitive modeling.

The Role of Literal Features During Processing of Novel Verbal Metaphors.

When a word is used metaphorically (for example "walrus" in the sentence "The president is a walrus"), some features of that word's meaning ("very fat," "slow-moving") are carried across to the metaphoric interpretation while other features ("has large tusks," "lives near the north pole") are not. What happens to these features that relate only to the literal meaning during processing of novel metaphors? In four experiments, the present study examined the role of the feature of physical containment during processing of verbs of physical containment. That feature is used metaphorically to signify difficulty, such as "fenced in" in the sentence "the journalist's opinion was fenced in after the change in regime." Results of a lexical decision task showed that video clips displaying a ball being trapped by a box facilitated comprehension of verbs of physical containment when the words were presented in isolation. However, when the verbs were embedded in sentences that rendered their interpretation metaphorical in a novel way, no such facilitation was found, as evidenced by two eye-tracking reading studies. We interpret this as suggesting that features that are critical for understanding the encoded meaning of verbs but are not part of the novel metaphoric interpretation are ignored during the construction of metaphorical meaning. Results and limitations of the paradigm are discussed in relation to previous findings in the literature both on metaphor comprehension and on the interaction between language comprehension and the visual world.