An ironic statement transmits the opposite meaning to its literal counterpart and is one of the most complex communicative acts. Thus, it has been proposed to be a good indicator of social communication ability. Prosody and facial expression are two crucial paralinguistic cues that can facilitate the understanding of ironic statements. The primary aim of this study was to create and evaluate a task of irony identification that could be used in neuroimaging studies. We independently evaluated three cues, contextual discrepancy, prosody and facial expression, and selected the best cue that would lead participants in fMRI studies to identify a stimulus as ironic in a reliable way. This process included the design, selection, and comparison of the three cues, all of which have been previously associated with irony detection. The secondary aim was to correlate irony comprehension with specific cognitive functions. Results showed that psycholinguistic properties could differentiate irony from other communicative acts. The contextual discrepancy, prosody, and facial expression were relevant cues that helped detect ironic statements; with contextual discrepancy being the cue that produced the highest classification accuracy and classification time. This task can be used successfully to test irony comprehension in Spanish speakers using the cue of interest. The correlation of irony comprehension with cognitive functions did not yield consistent results. A more heterogeneous sample of participants and a broader battery of tests may be needed to find reliable cognitive correlates of irony comprehension.
Speakers use a variety of contextual information, such as facial emotional expressions for the successful transmission of their message. Listeners must decipher the meaning by understanding the intention behind it (Recanati, 1986). A traditional approach to the study of communicative intention has been through speech acts (Escandell, 2006). The objective of the present study is to further the understanding of the influence of facial expression to the recognition of communicative intention. The study sought to: verify the reliability of facial expressions recognition, find if there is an association between a facial expression and a category of speech acts, test if words contain an intentional load independent of the facial expression presented, and test whether facial expressions can modify an utterance’s communicative intention and the neural correlates associated using univariate and multivariate approaches. We found that previous observation of facial expressions associated with emotions can modify the interpretation of an assertive utterance that followed the facial expression. The hemodynamic brain response to an assertive utterance was moderated by the preceding facial expression and that classification based on the emotions expressed by the facial expression could be decoded by fluctuations in the brain’s hemodynamic response during the presentation of the assertive utterance. Neuroimaging data showed activation of regions involved in language, intentionality and face recognition during the utterance’s reading. Our results indicate that facial expression is a relevant contextual cue that decodes the intention of an utterance, and during decoding it engages different brain regions in agreement with the emotion expressed.
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