The Eye Movement Study Of Irony Comprehension In Chinese Reading

As a non-literal language,irony is a very common linguistic phenomenon in daily life and communication.In recent years,with the development of non-literal language,many researchers have become interested in the complex cognitive processing of irony.This study included two experiments,using eye movement tracking technology,taking emotional information as the clue of irony context suggestion,to explore the process of irony cognition in natural reading of primary school students and college students,so as to verify the existing irony theories and hypotheses.Experiment 1 takes college students as subjects to verify the existing irony theories and the influence of emotional information in context on irony understanding.After showed that college students was influenced by emotional information during the irony reading,in Experiment 2,we examined the influence of emotional information while irony understanding of children at the transition stage of irony development.This study manipulated the emotional information in context(with emotional valence words and without emotional valence words),compared the reading time and the eye movement trajectory of irony and non-irony text types,explored the influence of emotional information on the understanding of irony.Based on the results of the two experiments,the following conclusions can be drawn :(1)Compared with literal,college students need to pay more processing energy in irony reading,which conforms to the hierarchical significance hypothesis and the standard pragmatic view,and does not prove the direct access theory.(2)In the understanding of irony expression,college students need to review and understand the literal meaning of irony and support the hierarchical significance hypothesis,which is inconsistent with the standard pragmatic view.(3)The effect of context on irony comprehension occurs in the later stage of irony comprehension,and emotional information has a inhibitory effect on irony effect,which means that emotional information has shorten the difference between irony processing time and non-irony expression processing time.(4)Taking Chinese irony as the research object,readers were more inclined to stress and integrate the sentence after reading the complete sentence,rather than reread immediately after the irony effect appears.(5)Consistent with college students,children's understanding of irony also required extra processing time,but children paid more attention to the literal meaning expressed by irony and did not analyze the context,demonstrating that emotional information from the context does not play a role in the understanding of irony.