Does laughter play a role in irony comprehension?

Chiara Mazzocconi (1, 2) , Caterina Petrone (2) , Maud Champagne-Lavau (2)

1 ILCB - Institute of Language, Communication and the Brain
2 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage

Laughter performs multiple pragmatic functions in conversation (Glenn et Holt, 2013). It is often used to show enjoyment of pleasant incongruities (c.a. humour), to smooth dialogue acts having a potential negative effect on the ideal flow of a conversation (e.g. disagreement, asking a favour), or to show pleasant appraisals (e.g., accompanying a compliment) (Mazzocconi et al. 2020). Furthermore, laughter can be a cue of non-literal intentions (Hoicka and Gattis, 2008) signalling incongruities between what is said and what is meant (e.g. irony or scare quoting; Schaffer 1982; Haiman, 1998; Ginzburg et al., 2020), marking non-serious or negative speaker’s attitudes (Attardo et al., 2003; Utsumi, 2000). Bryant (2016) extracted ironic utterances from natural friendly conversations and presented them out of context, with or without the adjacent laughter. The presence of laughter increased listeners’ judgements of non-literal speaker’s meaning. However, we still don’t know whether laughter cues ironic interpretation of sentences when embedded in context. Contextual incongruity in relation to the target sentence has been consistently identified as the most important factor for ironic interpretation (Ivanko and Pexman, 2003; Champagne-Lavau et al., 2012; Riviere et al. 2018). Burgers et al.'s (2012) results show, in line with Utsumi’s (2000) model, that the co-presence of multiple cues reduces the complexity of irony processing. Deliens et al. (2018) demonstrates that the presence of other multi-modal markers of irony, such as prosody or facial expressions, can outweigh the presence of more reliable contextual cues, in the interest of faster, yet less accurate, responses. We hypothesized that laughter would lead towards ironic responses, especially when contextual cues are not very strong (i.e. weak incongruity with the target sentence). Furthermore, laughter will facilitate processing and induce faster reaction times in the case of strong incongruity, as in this case it will be a redundant cue for irony interpretation

Mots clés: irony; laughter; multi-modal language processing

Domaines: Linguistique; Sciences cognitives

Chiara Mazzocconi, Caterina Petrone, Maud Champagne-Lavau. Does laughter play a role in irony comprehension?. 9th Experimental Pagmatics Conference (XPRAG 2022), Sep 2022, Pavia (IT), Italy. ⟨hal-03878579⟩