Irony is a heavily context-dependent pragmatic phenomenon. But what is it about context that facilitates or blocks irony comprehension? Based on the echoic account, we suggest that a context facilitates irony comprehension when it makes manifest a speaker's intentions and attitude, i.e., when a context makes it easy for participants to engage…

Objective: ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts pragmatic communication abilities in children, including their understanding of verbal irony. This study aims to investigate whether adults with ADHD experience similar challenges in interpreting ironic statements, and to examine the role of executive attention abilities in accounting…

This article addresses a current theoretical debate between modular and interactive accounts of sarcasm processing, by investigating the role of context (specifically, knowing that a character has been sarcastic before) in the comprehension of a sarcastic remark. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted in which participants were asked to read…

Translation has long played a role in linguistic and literary studies research. More recently, the theoretical and methodological concerns of process research have given translation an additional role in cognitive science. The interest in the cognitive aspects of translation has led scholars to turn to disciplines such as cognitive linguistics,…

Learners of English as a foreign language often find it difficult to understand figurative speech, which relies heavily on metaphor. This article explores why metaphors challenge learners and presents ways to incorporate metaphors into EFL instruction to help learners understand figurative speech. Topics discussed include cognitive metaphor,…

This study investigated metaphor comprehension in a group of 24 Italian high-functioning ASD children (mean age: 8.5 y.). Children were administered a test that was composed of "sensorial metaphors", which are understood by normally developing preschoolers, that the children had to verbally explain. Two normally developing control…

The main goal of the present study was to characterise the pragmatic abilities of French children with cerebral palsy through their understanding of irony and other people's mental states. We predicted that children with cerebral palsy would have difficulty understanding false-belief and ironic remarks, due to the executive dysfunction that…

Among different types of metaphors, lexical metaphors are special in that they have been highly lexicalized and often suggested to be processed like non-metaphorical words. The present study examined two types of Chinese metaphorical words which are conceptualized through body parts. One has both a metaphorical meaning and a literal meaning…

We report an eye-tracking study in which we investigate the on-line processing of written irony. Specifically, participants' eye movements were recorded while they read sentences which were either intended ironically, or non-ironically, and subsequent text which contained pronominal reference to the ironic (or non-ironic) phrase. Results showed…

Spoken language comprehension is known to involve a large left-dominant network of fronto-temporal brain regions, but there is still little consensus about how the syntactic and semantic aspects of language are processed within this network. In an fMRI study, volunteers heard spoken sentences that contained either syntactic or semantic ambiguities…

Neuroimaging studies have shown that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) plays a critical role in semantic and syntactic aspects of speech comprehension. It appears to be recruited when listeners are required to select the appropriate meaning or syntactic role for words within a sentence. However, this region is also recruited during tasks not…

Figurative language, such as metaphor and metonymy are common in our daily communication. This is one of the first studies to investigate metaphor and metonymy comprehension using a developmental approach. Forty-five typically developing individuals participated in a metaphor-metonymy verbal comprehension task incorporating 20 short…

Previous research has suggested that a failure in processing contextual information may account for the heterogeneous clinical manifestations and cognitive impairments observed in schizophrenia. In the domain of language, context processing in schizophrenia has been investigated mostly with single-word semantic priming paradigms; however, natural…

This study describes the development of social reasoning in school-age children. An irony task is used to assess 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (N = 72) and adults' (N = 24) recursive understanding of others' minds. Guttman scale analysis demonstrates that in order to understand a speaker's communicative intention, a child needs to recognize the…

Four-year-olds were asked to assess an adult listener's knowledge of the location of a hidden sticker after the listener was provided an ambiguous or unambiguous description of the sticker location. When preschoolers possessed private knowledge about the sticker location, the location they chose indicated that they judged a description to be…