IN THE PRESENT STUDY WE ADDRESSED TWO NOVEL QUESTIONS (1) is children's irony appreciation and processing related to their empathy skills? and (2) is children's processing of a speaker's ironic meaning best explained by a modular or interactive theory? Participants were thirty-one 8- and 9-year-olds children. We used a variant of the visual world paradigm to assess children's processing of iron...

Emotional information is conveyed through verbal and nonverbal signals, with nonverbal cues often being considered the decisive factor in the judgment of others' emotional states. The aim of the present study was to examine how verbal and nonverbal cues are integrated by perceivers. More specifically, we tested whether the mismatch between verbal and nonverbal information was perceived as an ex...

Irony, a creative use of language, has received scarce attention from the computational linguistics research point of view. We propose an automatic system capable of detecting irony with good accuracy in the social network Twitter. Twitter allows users to post short messages (140 characters) which usually do not follow the expected rules of the grammar, users tend to truncate words and use part...

Kenya over the last few decades, and the change from a nomadic lifestyle to communally owned ranches, wildlife in the Samburu District is under threat from deforestation, land degradation, overgrazing by livestock, and unsustainable water use. Alexander Njue, who is also involved in a separate Earthwatchsponsored project studying the wildlife habitats in this area, hopes that wildlife can also ...

Computational creativity is one of the central research topics of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing today. Irony, a creative use of language, has received very little attention from the computational linguistics research point of view. In this study we investigate the automatic detection of irony casting it as a classification problem. We propose a model capable of detecti...

The study reported herein explored the comprehension of metaphor and irony in schizophrenia during remission, and examined the role of IQ and a theory of mind. Performance of 29 Schizophrenic patients in remission and 22 healthy controls was compared on metaphor and irony comprehension tasks and first- and second-order theory of mind tasks. Participants' IQs were measured using the Wechsler Adu...

Deficits in pragmatic abilities have frequently been observed in patients with schizophrenia. The objective of the study was to investigate the relationship between pragmatic deficits, ToM deficits and executive dysfunctions in schizophrenia. A group of 42 schizophrenic patients and 42 healthy controls were assessed on irony task (one type of pragmatic language), two subcomponents of ToM (cogni...

It is well known that speakers rely on prosodic and gestural features at the time of producing and understanding verbal irony. Yet little research has examined (a) how gestures manifest themselves in spontaneous speech, both during and after ironic utterances; and (b) how the presence of the so-called ‘gestural codas’ (audiovisual cues produced after the ironic utterance) influences irony detec...

This paper presents a formal semantics of verbal irony in assertions. In particular, it makes precise what is meant by the common intuition that an ironic utterance expresses the opposite of its literal meaning. We start by considering cases of verbal irony that are marked by a particular prosodic tune in English. We then demonstrate that an extant model for intonational meaning can be extended...