ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1619358
Cognitive Processing of Chinese Verbal Irony: The Role of Reverse Adjacency Relations in Reaction Time and Accuracy
Provisionally accepted
- Chongqing Normal University, Chongqing, China
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This study investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying the comprehension of Chinese verbal irony, focusing on the role of reverse adjacency relations in reaction time (RT) and accuracy. Traditional theories of irony, such as Grice's Standard Pragmatic Model and Sperber and Wilson's echoic mention theory, inadequately explain culture-specific irony processing in Mandarin. Building on Huang's framework, which posits that irony comprehension relies on recognizing gradient reverse adjacency relations within conceptual hierarchies, this research employed a self-paced reading and judgment task via an online platform (Wenjuanxing) with 75 native Mandarin speakers. Participants evaluated 60 sentences divided into three conditions: experimental (irony with reverse adjacency relations), control (irony without such relations), and baseline (non-ironic). Results revealed statistically significant difference across conditions, for experimental ironic sentences (6,012 ms) compared to control (4,901 ms) and baseline sentences (3,987 ms all p<.001).Accuracy rates followed a similar pattern, with the experimental condition (64.1%) lower than the control (73.6%) and baseline (82.3%, all p<.01). These findings highlight the cognitive cost of resolving reverse adjacency relations, supporting Huang's theory that irony processing involves intuitive manipulation of relational knowledge. The results challenge universalist models, emphasizing the need for culture-sensitive frameworks in figurative language studies. Additionally, a moderate positive correlation (r = 0.4, p<.001) between RT and accuracy cross all conditions underscored a speed-accuracy tradeoff, suggesting unexplored factors influencing irony comprehension. This study advances cognitive pragmatics by integrating relational hierarchies into irony theories and offers implications for cross-cultural communication, language pedagogy, and NLP systems.
Keywords: Chinese Verbal Irony, Reverse Adjacency Relations, cognitive processing, Reaction Time, accuracy
Received: 28 Apr 2025; Accepted: 04 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Huang, Li, zheng and Yang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Mian Huang, Chongqing Normal University, Chongqing, China
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