Home > Events > LangSci Lunch Talk: Rachel Adler (HESP)
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LangSci Lunch Talk: Rachel Adler (HESP)

Time: 
Thursday, February 26, 2015 - 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM
Location: 
St. Mary's Multipurpose Room

Food and ideas bring people together.  Our weekly lunch talk series provides students and faculty with the opportunity to present their in-progress work to a supportive, interdisciplinary audience.

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Title:  What a fabulous talk! The time-course of interpreting verbal irony

 
In everyday conversation, a great deal of information is communicated without ever actually being said. For example, speakers may use irony to express information that is contrary to the literal meaning of an utterance (e.g., saying “What a fabulous chef Sally is” after she just burned a meal). By integrating such contextual information with the linguistic input, listeners are able to arrive at the appropriate interpretation of speakers’ utterances. However, it remains unknown what specific types of extra-linguistic information listeners use and the time-course with which they do so. For example, do listeners necessarily compute the literal interpretation of an ironic utterance before reaching the correct, ironic interpretation? Alternatively, are they able to access the ironic interpretation directly through salient contextual cues, such as knowledge of the speaker or prosody of the utterance? Prior studies addressing these issues have relied on methods that provide few contextual cues to irony and measure interpretations with coarse-grained temporal resolution. In this talk, I will propose a study that uses eye-tracking to examine listeners’ moment-to-moment interpretations as they listen to ironic utterances in contextually-rich environments. These findings will reveal how linguistic and extra-linguistic information is integrated during irony comprehension and pave the way for future work examining the mechanisms underlying nonliteral language processing.