Obligatory Processing of the Literal Meaning of Ironic Utterances: Further Evidence

We tested the hypotheses that the literal meaning of an ironic utterance is activated during comprehension and (a) slows the processing of the key ironic portion of the utterance (literal activation hypothesis) and (b) slows the processing of the literal portion of the utterance that follows (the spillover hypothesis). Forty-eight stories, each ending in an ironic comment, were constructed. Half of the ironic comments were ironic criticism (positive literal meaning, negative ironic meaning); half were ironic praise (negative literal meaning, positive ironic meaning). Final utterances were divided into 3 phrases: Phrase 1 gave no indication of irony, Phrase 2 contained the key word that made the utterance ironic, and Phrase 3 gave no indication of irony. Each story was then altered by 1 phrase so that the final comment became literal. One version of each of the stories was presented to each of 48 college undergraduates. Stories were presented 1 sentence at a time, but the final utterances were presented in 3 consecutive phrases. Participants pressed the space bar as soon as they understood the sentence or phrase presented. For ironic criticism, participants took longer to process the key phrases in an irony- than a literal-biasing context, but they took longer to process the final (literal) phrase following irony only when the analysis was performed for item rather than participant variability. For ironic praise, participants again took longer to process the key phrases in an irony- than a literal-biasing context, but this difference did not reach significance, and they did not take any longer to process the final phrase following irony. Thus, results support the literal activation hypothesis in the case of ironic criticism but not ironic praise and provide no clear support for the spillover hypothesis.