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Poster A29, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 10:15 am – 12:00 pm, Restaurant Hall

Brain Irony Processing Developmental Trajectory

Gloria Avecilla-Ramirez1, Silvia Ruiz Tovar1, Hugo Corona Hernández1, Karina Hess1, Lucero Díaz Calzada1, Josué Romero1;1Autonomous University of Queretaro

Verbal irony is a contextually inappropriate and intentional linguistic expression characterized by contradicting the information provided by the speaker. It is a linguistic phenomenon that is acquired later rather than early in life; it is not until approximately the age of 8 to 9 that children are successful in recognizing any aspect of the communicative function of irony, and it is not until adolescence that they are able to understand its discursive function. Through different approaches, research on verbal irony has provided evidence about social, cognitive and linguistic abilities that might make children able to progressively both convey and grasp ironic intended meanings. Searching for N400 and P600 effects, Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) have been used to study verbal irony processing in adults using reading paradigms. The objective of this study was to study the development of irony processing using the Event-Related Potential (ERPs) technique. To do this, brain electrical activity associated with the processing of irony was analyzed in Mexican children and adolescents at two specific stages of development: ages 9 and 15. The participants of the study were eleven 9-year-olds and twelve 15-year-olds, who were asked to read stories with ironic content. All participants were interviewed in order to demonstrate if he or she could understand and explain verbal irony after the EEG recording. A total of fifty brief stories (twenty ironic, twenty non-ironic and ten fillers) were used for the ERP paradigm. Each story has a context and a target sentence. Each target sentence has two target words that represent the stimuli to which ERPs were synchronized: the critical word (always the second word of the sentence), whose ironic or literal meaning depends on context, and the final word of the sentence. The N400 and P600 components were analyzed both in the critical word and in the final word of the ironic statement. No N400 effect was observed in any of the word positions (critical and final). This result supports previous findings in adults, suggesting that no semantic integration difficulty arises during ironic comprehension. Independent repeated measures ANOVAs, with three within-subject factors (2 Conditions x 8 Scalp regions x 2 Hemispheres), were carried out for a 550-850 msec window. The results of the 9-year-old participants showed no P600 effect for the critical word, but the presence of a statistical tendency in the P600 window in the final word (F(1,10)=4.83, p=.053). The 15-year-old group showed a P600 effect only in the critical word (F(1,11)= 5.83, p<.05), but no statistical differences in the final word. The 9-year-old participants seem to achieve the verbal irony integration process until they read the ironic sentence´s final word, while the 15-year-old participants were able to process the verbal irony by the time they read the ironic sentence critical word. These results suggest that the two age groups are at different moments in the development of irony processing.

Themes: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Development
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)

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