Neuropsychological Research On The Constraints Of Context In Chinese Irony Comprehension

The use of irony is ubiquitous in everyday utterances. As one of the specific forms of non-literal language, irony has the general features of non-literal language, and also possesses its own pragmatic and cognitive particularities. With the progress in the investigation of non-literal language, more and more scholars pay close attention to the important role of irony in daily communication and its complex internal mechanism. The processing progress and the influencing factors of irony comprehension have become the hot issues in psycholinguistic and cognitive researches in recent years. Although abundant research results have been achieved, still in many aspects there are also considerable divergences. In particular, various theories and hypotheses hold different views about the role of context in irony comprehension. Scholars have conducted a large number of empirical studies from multiple perspectives using different paradigms. However, they have not yet reached a consensus.With the help of cognitive neuroscience methods, the purpose of this study is to examine the role of context in the cognitive processing of Chinese irony. By combining literal/ironic statements with the "focusing effect" of positive/negative quantifiers on anaphoric reference, the first experiment is devoted to exploring the function of linguistic context in irony processing. Participants’eye movements were recorded while they read evaluative sentences which were either intended ironically, or non-ironically, and subsequent text which contained pronominal reference to the ironic or non-ironic phrase. The data collected online was divided into different regions of interest for off-line analysis, to discuss the activation of literal meaning and the access of ironic meaning. The second experiment investigated the dynamic progress of non-linguistic context affecting Chinese irony comprehesion. Event-related potentials were recorded as participants read short passages that ended either with literal or ironic statements made by one of two speakers. The experiment was carried out in two sessions in which each speaker’s use of irony was manipulated. Meanwhile, rating-scale was used to measure participants’pragmatic competence, aiming to find out whether and how the speaker’s communicative style and the listener’s pragmatic competence will correspondently affect the cognitive processing of irony. Specifically, the second experiment was designed to assess whether knowledge about the speaker’s communicative style impacts the listener’s brain response to irony, and whether the listener’s pragmatic competence impacts the perception of speaker’s communicative style and then affects irony comprehension further. Through these experiments, the following findings are obtained:(1) Additional efforts are required in irony processing compared with non-ironic statements. The literal meanings of ironic statements are always activated at the very beginning, and both the ironic and literal meanings of the expressions are equally accessible during the late stage of semantic and syntactic integration.(2) The listener can quickly acquire the knowledge about the speaker’s communicative style while processing. This pragmatic information as the element of non-linguistic context mainly affects the early recognition and late integration of irony processing. Listeners with higher pragmatic competence are more sensitive to the differences of communicative style between two speakers. Then they will form higher expectations for the utterances in line with the communicative style of specific speaker, so as to affects the early recognition stage of irony processing.In addition, this study reviews existing theories and hypotheses about the cognitive processing of irony, and analyses different types of linguistic and non-linguistic factors affecting irony comprehension. On the basis of experimental evidence, we put forward the dynamic constructive model of Chinese irony comprehension, emphasizing people as the agent of communication and cognition is an important part in non-linguistic context, trying to provide a new perspective for the current trend in the empirical study of non-literal language comprehension which takes individual differences as cognitive factors equally with linguistic and contextual factors and discusses them separately.