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9 - Tracking the Ironical Eye: Eye Tracking Studies on Irony and Sarcasm

from Part IV - Irony in Linguistic Communication

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2023

By
Salvatore Attardo
Edited by
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr  and
Herbert L. Colston
Herbert L. Colston
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Summary

This chapter describes how people read and interpret ironical language. Tracking people’s rapid eye movements as they read can be an informative measure of the underling cognitive and linguistic processes operating during online written language comprehension. Attardo introduces some of the technologies employed in measuring eye movements during reading and suggests why these assessments can provide critical insights into how irony interpretation rapidly unfolds word-by-word as one reads. He reviews various experimental studies on irony and sarcasm understanding that provide explicit empirical tests of different theories of irony (e.g., multistate models, graded salience, parallel-constraint models predictive processing models). He also explores what the study of eye tracking reveals about the influence of contextual factors and individual differences in irony interpretation, as well as the phenomenon known as “gaze aversion” when listeners momentarily look away from speakers’ faces when hearing ironic language. Attardo closes his chapter with an important discussion of the sometimes contentious relations between psycholinguistic experiments and philosophical arguments on the ways people use and interpret irony in discourse.

Keywords

eye-trackingirony interpretationlinguistic processingonline written comprehensionpsycholinguistic experimentssarcasmtheories of irony
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought , pp. 140 - 159
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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