The Effects Of Context And Expectation On Chinese Irony Processing

Irony, which is used to express the opposite meaning of its literal meaning, is a complex linguistic phenomenon. Two experiments were designed to investigate the mental processing of Chinese irony and the effects of context and expectation on it through two experiments. In experiment 1, the independent variables were context types and meanings of probe words and keywords, and the dependent variables were 1) the read time of keywords in different contexts,2)and the reaction times of the probe word in different contexts under 250ms or 1400ms ISI. The purpose of experiment 1 was exploring the priority of literal and ironic meaning in different contexts. In experiment 2, "having an ironic expectation or not" was added as another independent variable, to explore whether the expectation of ironic ending can facitate the ironic meanings processing. The purpose of experiment 2 was just as the former.The main conclusion are the followings:1) the literal and ironic meaning of an irony were accessed simultaneously at the early phase of the Chinese irony processing, while lately, the literal meaning was accessed faster.2) The strength of ironic context wouldn't facilitate the ironic meaning; even in strong ironic context the processing of literal meaning was as fast as or faster than that of ironic meaning.3) During processing, the literal meaning was always activated, and involved in the semantic integration process all along. According to present study, the Graded Salience Hypothesis is more suitable than Modular Hypothesis and Direct Access Hypothesis to explain the Chinese irony processing.The results enrich the researches of irony mental processing, and provide evidences to support non-literal language researches.