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Social knowledge about the speaker constrains early-on ironic interpretation: Evidence from neural oscillations
Poster E12 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Maud Champagne-Lavau1, Deirdre Bolger1, Madelyne Klein1; 1Aix-Marseille University
Introduction Irony understanding requires the listener to integrate linguistic information and extra-linguistic information (e.g., contextual information, encyclopedic knowledge of the world, knowledge about the speaker) to identify what the speaker means (Pexman & Olineck, 2002; Rivière & Champagne-Lavau, 2020). Knowledge about the speaker such as occupation stereotypes has been demonstrated to influence the extent to which utterances are interpreted as ironic. However, none of the studies (Akimoto et al., 2017; Regel et al., 2014; Rothermich et al., 2022; Spotorno et al., 2013) characterizing the oscillatory dynamics during irony processing manipulated speaker information and its impact on irony processing. Thus, the aim of the present study was to investigate the neurocognitive processes underlying the integration of linguistic and extra-linguistic information during irony comprehension. Using time-frequency analysis (TFA), we explored neuronal oscillatory activity during a task of irony understanding where implicit information about the speaker (i.e., speaker occupation stereotypes) was manipulated to cue, or not to cue, ironic intent. Methods We recorded EEG of twenty-two native French speakers during a task of irony comprehension. In this task, we manipulated the type of context (literal, ironic) and the presence of a speaker occupation stereotype (i.e., sarcastic versus non-sarcastic), thereby cueing or not ironic intent. TFA was performed on the neural oscillatory activity in the theta band (4-7 Hz), the alpha1 band (8-10 Hz), the alpha2 band (11- 13 Hz), the beta1 band (14-20 Hz), the beta2 band (20-30 Hz), the gamma1 band (30-40 Hz) and the gamma2 band (60-80 Hz). Results The main results showed that information about the speaker were taken into account in the early stage of irony processing. This early effect was evidenced by a greater synchronization (ERS) in the upper gamma band (in the 150-250 ms time window) when the speaker had a sarcastic occupation, by a greater desynchronization (ERD) for ironic context compared to literal context in the alpha1 band and by a greater ERS in the theta band when the speaker had a non-sarcastic occupation. Other main results showed, in the later stage of processing (500–800 ms time window), a greater ERS for ironic context in the theta band and a greater ERD in the alpha1 band when the speaker occupation did not constrain the ironic interpretation. Here, the interpretation of the utterance as ironic was revealed as resource-demanding and requiring pragmatic reanalysis. Conclusions These findings confirm predictions of the constraint satisfaction model suggesting that activation of the ironic interpretation is considered as soon as there are sufficient cues supporting it (Campbell & Katz, 2012). In the present study, speaker characteristics conveyed by occupation stereotypes influence early-on the linguistic comprehension process. This knowledge is integrated with linguistic and contextual information to constrain the interpretation. Our study also showed that inferential processing costs increase when the ironic interpretation was not expected as this is the case when the speaker occupation did not constrain the interpretation (non-sarcastic occupation condition).
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics,