Context and working memory capacity affect the processing of written irony in chinese: an eye-tracking study

Abstract

Written irony is defined as the use of words to express the opposite to the literal meaning. Comprehending ironic praise is more difficult than that of ironic criticism. However, whether and how language context and individuals' working memory capacity (WMC) affect irony comprehension in Chinese whose script is distinct from alphabetic languages are currently unclear and warrant further research. In this study, participants read ironic criticism and ironic praise sentences while their eye movements were recorded. The results showed that the processing of ironic praise needed longer first reading time, regression path time, and total reading time as compared to the ironic criticism. However, no significant difference was found between literal criticism and literal praise. In addition, when the inconsistency between context and the ironic utterance was weak, first-pass and rereading time for ironic praise were significantly longer than those for ironic criticism. However, there was no difference between ironic praise and criticism in the strong context inconsistency condition. Furthermore, participants with low WMC showed significantly longer total reading time for ironic praise than participants with high WMC. Moreover, they read the prior context of ironic praise with longer regression path reading time and rereading time than that of ironic criticism. Taken together, these results suggest that ironic praise is more difficult to read and require more cognitive resources relative to ironic criticism in Chinese, which was similar with findings in Western cultures and scripts. More importantly, prior context and WMC modulated differently the influence on irony comprehension. Specifically, the weak context inconsistency made it harder to understand the ironic praise than ironic criticism, lasting from the early to the late processing stages. However, the influence of WMC mainly occurred in the late integration stage of irony comprehension. This study makes two major theoretical contributions. First, it extends key findings on irony processing-the greater difficulty of understanding ironic praise and the role of context and working memory-to Chinese, a distinct language and cultural system, by confirming that these cognitive mechanisms are universal. Second, it clarifies how these factors operate at different stages of processing and suggests that features of a writing system (such as logographic script) can influence the timing of high-level language comprehension.