Volume 20 (2016): Issue 3 (December 2016)

Processing of figurative (nonliteral) language is the focus of this special issue of Psychology of Language and Communication. The main theme is irony, which has been called “the ethos of our times” (Wampole, 2012). The texts presented here consider irony from many different angles, thus expanding the psycholinguistic perspective to include problems of key importance for understanding the phenomenon. All of these texts open up new questions on irony comprehension and production. The next special issue (to be published in 2017) will discuss research on a different type of nonliteral language: metaphors.

The literature suggests that irony production expands in the developmental period of adolescence. We aimed to test this hypothesis by investigating two channels: face-to-face and computer-mediated communication (CMC). Corpora were collected by asking seventh and 11th graders to freely discuss some general topics (e.g., music), either face-to-face or on online forums. Results showed that 6.2% of the 11th graders’ productions were ironic utterances, compared with just 2.5% of the seventh graders’ productions, confirming the major development of irony production in adolescence. Results also showed that adolescents produced more ironic utterances in CMC than face-to-face. The analysis suggested that irony use is a strategy for increasing in-group solidarity and compensating for the distance intrinsic to CMC, as it was mostly inclusive and well-marked on forums. The present study also confirmed previous studies showing that irony is compatible with CMC.

Literature points towards the role of context in irony interpretation and the existence of gender differences in language use. We decided to examine the influence of interlocutors’ gender stereotypes on interpreting and reacting to ironic criticism in conversation. To this end, we designed two experiments gathering participants’ responses to the same ironic utterances voiced both by women and by men in control and gender stereotype activation conditions. Results of the first experiment showed that women tended to use irony significantly more often when responding to a man than to another woman. The second, ongoing experiment will additionally examine participants’ response times and total time of utterance in respect to their addressee’s gender. The results are discussed with regard to the social comparison theory (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987) and the linguistic intergroup bias theory (Wigboldus & Douglas, 2007).

Due to the growing interest not only in theoretical approaches to irony, but also in its pragmatic functions, the number of questions is increasing. One of them is: Is irony in any way connected to emotional intelligence? This paper outlines what irony is and how it is used in everyday conversations. Analysis of current studies in emotional intelligence highlights its influence over behavior and attitude. It led to an experiment where subjects (N = 80) where asked to fill an emotional intelligence questionnaire and an irony questionnaire. The results show that emotional intelligence is negatively correlated with the overall sum of ironic sentences and self-ironic sentences, and with the number of ironic praise sentences. Later, the implications of empirical findings are discussed.

A study was conducted to analyze the influence of situational and individual factors on verbal irony perception. Participants (N = 144) rated smartness, criticality, humorousness, and offensiveness of ironic utterances and their literal equivalents. The utterances were put in various contexts, differing in terms of the structure of the interlocutors’ social ranks and the responsibility of the addressee for the described event. Additionally, participants’ state and trait of anxiety were measured using the Polish adaptation of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (Wrześniewski, Sosnowski, Jaworowska, & Fecenec, 2011) and their social competences were measured with the Social Competences Questionnaire (Matczak, 2007). Analyses showed that the structure of the interlocutors’ social ranks, the addressee’s responsibility, as well as the state and trait of anxiety can influence the perception of irony, although it does not always concern all of the variables rated herein. No link between social competences and irony perception was found.

The main aim of the presented study was to investigate the influence of voice intonation on the comprehension of ironic utterances in 4- to 6-year-old Polish-speaking children. 83 preschool children were tested with the Irony Comprehension Task (Banasik & Bokus, 2012). In the Irony Comprehension Task, children are presented with stories in which ironic utterances were prerecorded and read by professional speakers using an ironic intonation. Half of the subjects performed the regular Irony Comprehension Task while the other half were given a modified version of the Irony Comprehension Task (ironic content was uttered using a non-ironic intonation). Results indicate that children from the ironic intonation group scored higher on the Irony Comprehension Task than children who heard ironic statements uttered using a neutral voice. Ironic voice intonation appeared to be a helpful cue to irony comprehension.

Recent research suggests that social cognitive abilities, particularly the theory of mind (ToM), play a role in the development of persuasion in early and middle childhood. This study investigated the relations between children’s intentionality understanding and early persuasive skills, especially the ability to use direct and indirect persuasive strategies in symmetric and asymmetric relational context. Ninety-five 5- to 7-year-olds participated in a narrative task that described persuasive situations with parents and peers and answered questions in intentionality understanding stories. Results showed that participants used indirect strategies less often than direct proposals. To persuade their parents, participants used more direct than indirect persuasive strategies, while this difference was not significant for peer persuasion. Correlation analysis revealed that independent of age and expressive language ability, intentionality understanding significantly predicted participants’ number of persuasive proposals and the use of direct and indirect bilateral persuasive strategies. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

This study investigates verbal irony comprehension by 6-year old bilingual children speaking Polish and English and living in the USA. Researchers have predominantly focused on monolingual populations when examining non-literal language in young children. This is the first exploratory study of how irony is comprehended by children growing up in a bilingual setting. Results suggest that 6-year olds from this population score high in decoding the intended meaning behind an ironic utterance and that there is a relation between this ability and the development of their theory of mind (ToM). Interestingly, the data suggests that in the tested sample, no difference could be observed between comprehension of sarcastic irony (i.e., irony containing the element of blame directed towards the addressee) and non-sarcastic irony (irony without criticism towards the interlocutor). The results may be a basis for assuming that irony comprehension may be different in bilingual, compared to monolingual, samples.

Irony as a communicative phenomenon continues to puzzle. One of the key questions concerns cognitive and linguistic mechanisms underpinning irony comprehension. Empirical research exploring how much time people need to grasp irony as compared to literal meanings, brought equivocal answers. In view of the timespan-oriented-approach’ inconclusiveness, we set to explore the efficiency of irony online processing in a limited-response-time paradigm. Additionally, we aimed to find out whether advanced nonnative users of a language, who have mastered ironic mode of thinking in their native language, get irony as efficiently in their nonnative as they do in their native language. Results show that participants were less efficient in processing irony than nonirony in both tested languages, yet the efficiency decreased in their nonnative language. These results license a claim that irony is a cognitively more demanding communicative phenomenon than literal meaning, and the effort invested in its comprehension increases in the nonnative language.