Electrophysiological Evidence of Different Interpretative Strategies in Irony Comprehension

Abstract

We explore the hypothesis that induction of holistic or analytic strategies influences comprehension and processing of highly contextualized expressions of ordinary language, such as irony. Twenty undergraduate students were asked to categorize as coherent or incoherent a group of sentences. Each sentence completed a previous story, so that they could be ironical, literal or nonsensical endings. Participants were asked to evaluate whether each sentence was coherent or incoherent. Half of them were initially instructed to consider whether the sentences made sense (holistic condition); the other half were instructed to consider whether the sentences were congruent or incongruent (analytic condition). Behavioral responses and Event Related Potentials were registered during the experiment. Both behavioral and electrophysiological results allow clearly distinguishing between the holistic and the analytic strategies. The fact that the same set of stimuli elicits different ERP waveforms, depending on the strategy with which they are analyzed, suggests that different cognitive processes and different areas of the brain are operating in each case.

Neurophysiological Markers of Phrasal Verb Processing: Evidence from L1 and L2 Speakers

“…This suggests that literal language can be harder to integrate and process than figurative language, especially if figurative language is high in cloze probability as was the case in this study (Strandburg, Marsh, Brown, Asarnow, Guthrie, Harper, Yee, & Nuechterlein, 1997). Other studies report N400 effects in response to metaphors (e.g., Coulson & Van Petten, 2002;2007;Pynte, Besson, Robichon, & Poli, 1996) or irony (e.g., Cornejo, Simonetti, Aldunate, Ibanez, Lopez, & Melloni, 2007;Regel, Gunter, & Friederici, 2011).…”

Isn't It Ironic? An Electrophysiological Exploration of Figurative Language Processing

“…With regard to figurative language comprehension, N400 effects were often seen in response to metaphors (Coulson & Van Petten, 2002, 2007Tartter, Gomes, Dubrovsky, Molholm, & Stewart, 2002;Pynte, Besson, Robichon, & Poli, 1996), or proverbs and idioms (Ferretti, Schwint, & Katz, 2007;Laurent, Denhieres, Passerieux, Iakimova, & Hardy-Bayle, 2006). Cornejo et al (2007) found an N400-like component for irony, which depended on the interpretative strategy applied. This N400-like effect emerged during holistic processing (i.e., focusing on sentence plausibility) but not during analytic processing (i.e., judging sentence congruency).…”

Effects of regiolects on the perception of developmental foreign accent syndrome

“…Indeed, the absence of a difference between the strong incongruity and weak incongruity context conditions in the RHD-I group suggests that the difficulty in understanding irony would be due to a lack of sensitivity to the contextual information rather than to a difficulty in integrating this information. RHD-I participants would use a local, analytic strategy to process the target utterance, leading them to opt most of the time for the literal meaning of the sentence (Cornejo et al, 2007 …”