A referential metaphor is a cohesive tie between lexical items that are metaphorically related, (e.g. "'The seagull' took the bread from the coffee table. No one heard the 'thief'"). The reference from "the thief" back to "the seagull" is metaphorical because thieves are human. The present article presents arguments…

Eyetracking studies have shown that readers reread ironic phrases when resolving their meaning. Moreover, it has been shown that the timecourse of processing ironic meaning is affected by reader's working memory capacity (WMC). Irony is a context-dependent phenomenon but using traditional eye-movement measures it is difficult to analyze processing…

Past work has suggested that L1 readers retrieve idioms (i.e., "spill the tea") directly vs. matched literal controls ("drink the tea") following unbiased contexts, whereas L2 readers process idioms more compositionally. However, it is unclear whether this occurs when a figuratively or literally biased context…

The present study in French sought to investigate which factors predict irony perception most efficiently. An experiment was developed following three steps. The first two steps focused on the creation of stimuli to be evaluated in the third step. In this last step, participants, whose sociocultural characteristics (gender, age, and level of…

The rhetoric used by right-wing anti-immigration politicians is considered important to their political success. Such rhetoric commonly contains figurative frames with metaphor and/or hyperbole. In two experiments (n[subscript experiment1] = 411, n[subscript experiment2] = 407), we tested when and how such figurative frames add to the intense and…

In spoken discourse, understanding irony requires the apprehension of subtle cues, such as the speaker's tone of voice (prosody), which often reveal the speaker's affective stance toward the listener in the context of the utterance. To shed light on the interplay of linguistic content and prosody on impressions of spoken criticisms and compliments…

Several theoretical proposals tried to account for the meaning open-endedness of metaphors in literature and for the effortful process they trigger in readers. However, very few experiments have tackled the neurophysiological underpinnings of literary metaphor. Here we used Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to explore the temporal dynamics of…

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…

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…

During reading, the model of the situation described by the text is continuously accommodated to new text input. The hypothesis was tested that readers are particularly sensitive to diagnostic text information that can be used to constrain their existing situation model. In 3 experiments, adult participants read narratives about social situations…