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Some ironies are easier than others, or are they? Insights from a study with Polish monolingual teenagers.

Dorota Jaworska-Pasterska1* and Tomasz Pasterski1
  • 1 Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland

While numerous theoretical approaches have been proposed to account for the comprehension and perception of nonliteral utterances (Grice 1975, 1978; Sperber and Wilson 1981; Clark and Gerrig 1984; Sperber and Wilson 1986; Kreuz and Glucksberg 1989; Kumon-Nakamura et al. 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2012), it is only recently – with the advent of neuropragmatics and experimental pragmatics – that these, and other related problems have begun to be addressed from a more empirical perspective (Bambini and Domaneschi 2017). Many of these studies have yielded critical results concerning the developmental path of irony understanding (Capelli et al. 1990; Winner and Gardner 1993; Pexman and Glenwright 2007; Glenwright and Pexman 2010), as well as the role that affect (Bromberek-Dyzman 2014), second-order mentalising (Winner and Leekam 1991; Happé 1993, 1995; Sullivan et al. 1995; Hancock et al. 2000; Monetta et al. 2009; Nilsen et al. 2011; Caillies et al. 2012; Massaro et al. 2013; Caillies et al. 2014; Bosco and Gabbatore 2017), and literal meaning (Weiland et al. 2014) play in irony comprehension. On the other hand, little is still known about whether and – if so – what differences exist in how speakers produce and interpret diverse types of ironic utterances. Empirical investigations looking into irony production and processing have tended to employ distinct definitions of irony and disparate operationalisations of comprehension (Creusere 1999), which makes it difficult to integrate their findings into a coherent picture. Experimental literature on irony types, in turn, is not free from methodological problems: while some studies used distinct linguistic phenomena as comparable forms of irony (Wilson 2017), others (e.g. Gibbs 2000) introduced such irony categories that were not mutually exclusive. The goal of the current study was to shed light on the potential differences in naïve language users’ comprehension and perception of unambiguously ironic sentences belonging to comparable and mutually exclusive categories. To this end, 50 short scenarios were created which presented brief interactions between two characters. In each story, one character always either exhibited an excessive behaviour or boasted about having a certain skill, and then failed at it. Subsequently, the second character commented on the first character’s behaviour or failure. To every scenario, ten different comments were designed – five ironic and five literal ones, such that each comment on the five-item ironic/literal set had the form of a different speech act, as distinguished by Searle (1969). Thus, in line with the proposal of Kumon-Nakamura et al. (1995), the study employed five mutually exclusive types of ironic utterances: assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declaratives. The salience of these stimuli was pre-tested on a 5 point Likert-type ironicalness scale by a group of 200 naïve native speakers of Polish. Here – already at the pretest stage – interesting results were obtained concerning the ironic potential of the declarative. The stimuli which were ranked as the most ironic (scoring between 4 and 5) and the most literal (scoring between 1 and 2) made up the Sarcastic Irony Battery, the major research instrument employed in the current study. The battery, which was intended as a versatile tool for measuring the basic aspects of irony comprehension, comprised 20 ironic and 20 literal scenarios belonging to the five speech act categories. To every scenario on the battery, a set of four simple questions was designed. Each question tested a different component of irony comprehension, as discussed in the relevant psycholinguistic literature: context comprehension, recognition of speaker belief (Theory of Mind), recognition of speaker intention, and perception of speaker attitude (Creusere 1999; Harris and Pexman 2003; Pexman et al. 2005; Glenwright and Pexman 2010; Pexman and Whalen 2010). As most studies of irony have focussed on children (Dews et al. 1996; Harris and Pexman 2003; Pexman and Glenwright 2007; Glenwright and Pexman 2010), little is still known about how teenagers interpret ironic utterances. The current study aimed at filling this gap. The authors tested 91 monolingual teenagers (52 girls and 39 boys, age range 13-16) on the Sarcastic Irony Battery. Participants were auditorily presented with the recorded scenarios, and asked to answer the four test questions. Subsequently, statistical analysis was performed on the obtained data to check for significant differences in participants’ comprehension of the five irony types. Friedman’s ANOVA yielded a significant difference in ironic stimuli comprehension in the five ironic speech act conditions, χ2 (4) = 12.917, p = 0.012, p < 0.05. Post hoc analysis with sign and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests was conducted with a Bonferroni correction applied, resulting in a significance level set at p < 0.005. Here, the differences between ironic expressives and commissives (Z = -3.143, p = 0.002), as well as between ironic expressives and assertives (Z = -3.004, p = 0.003) reached statistical significance. Overall, expressives turned out to be best understood, whereas commissives and assertives were the least understood types of irony. Qualitative analysis yielded interesting insights concerning participants’ perceptions of the ironic speaker: it seems that teenagers are aware that the ironist does not always wish to hurt, and that they appreciate the playful side of irony. They understand that ironic utterances may serve a humour function, recognition of which has been claimed to have a prolonged developmental path (Dews et al. 1996). The findings and conclusions of the study will be discussed against the background of the relevant neuropragmatic and developmental literature.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Mr. Jacek Mańko for his help in stimuli creation.

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Keywords: Irony comprehension, Speech Acts, developmental pragmatics, irony, Sarcasm

Conference: XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference, Pavia, Italy, 30 May - 1 Jun, 2018.

Presentation Type: Poster or Oral

Topic: Experimental Pragmatics

Citation: Jaworska-Pasterska D and Pasterski T (2018). Some ironies are easier than others, or are they? Insights from a study with Polish monolingual teenagers.. Front. Psychol. Conference Abstract: XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference. doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2018.73.00031

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Received: 15 May 2018; Published Online: 14 Dec 2018.

* Correspondence: Ms. Dorota Jaworska-Pasterska, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poznan, Poland, dorotajw@wa.amu.edu.pl