Task Effects in Irony Comprehension in English as a Foreign Language.
Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman, Joanna Kowalik, Anna Pękacz
PMID 36475983WHAT IT FOUND
For advanced Polish students reading English, the task changed irony processing.
Truth/false judgments made irony slower than literal comments. Praise/criticism judgments made ironic praise slower than literal praise, and ironic criticism faster than literal criticism.
Key findings
01When participants judged whether a statement was true or false, they answered literal comments faster than ironic comments.
02When participants judged whether a comment was praising or critical, ironic criticism was faster than literal criticism, while literal praise was faster than ironic praise.
03The task changed the pattern for irony: ironic criticism was faster in the praising/critical task than in the true/false task, and ironic praise was faster in the true/false task than in the praising/critical task.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The participants were university students with advanced English (CEFR C1/C2), not a clinical population. The study tested written irony comprehension in English as a foreign language, so it does not show how irony is understood in speech, video, or everyday conversation. The tasks were lab tasks with response deadlines of 1800 ms in the true/false task and 1500 ms in the praising/critical task, which may not match clinical assessment. The true/false and praising/critical tasks were done by different groups, so differences between tasks also involve differences between participants. The authors did not compare the same tasks in Polish and English, so the study cannot say whether the task effects are specific to English as a foreign language. The main study included 83 participants in the true/false task and 67 participants in the praising/critical task; the validation tests included 30 and 26 students.
Declared interests
The authors reported no financial support for the research, authorship, or publication.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the slower irony responses as evidence of a language disorder. The participants were students with advanced English, and the task changed which comments were hardest, so performance here reflects the question format as well as irony comprehension.