Irony in Language Use and Communication

This chapter tests the hypothesised effects of various factors on sarcasm processing. In an eye-tracking experiment, participants read texts ending in either literal or sarcastic and familiar or unfamiliar remarks, either echoing a previous contextual utterance or not. Results indicated that (1) the effect of utterance literality was observed in the later processing stages when sarcasm was more difficult to process than literal language, (2) utterance familiarity also affected processing, and (3