Psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on verbal material. Yet, metaphors frequently occur in a multimodal format, blending words and pictures to convey meaning. Here we compared verbal and multimodal metaphors by using item pairs where stimulus one was always a word (e.g., "language" in the metaphorical conditions and…

Comprehension is an important factor in the functioning of irony. Readers who are unaware of the irony in an utterance are "sheep," whereas readers who understand the irony are "wolves" (Gibbs & Izett, 2005). Factors that may impact on the attitude toward irony not only include comprehension, but agreement (agreeing with…

This article investigates the contextual components utilized to convey sarcastic verbal irony, testing whether theoretical components deemed as necessary for creating a sense of irony are, in fact, necessary. A novel task was employed: Given a set of statements that out of context were not rated as sarcastic, participants were instructed to either…

Recently, irony researchers have emphasized that irony interpretation involves metarepresentational inferencing in order that the perceiver can determine whether the speaker's attitude is counterfactual to their statement. This research investigated whether the perception of irony also depends on the extent to which an ironic statement is suitably…

A number of studies have now examined the development of children's appreciation for verbal irony, typically by testing children's comprehension of the ironic speaker's belief and intent. This article examines a topic that has received much less attention: children's ability to produce irony in context-appropriate ways. The study presents 7- to…