The influence of speaker beliefs and task demands on perspective-taking in irony comprehension

This study investigated, through two experiments, how speaker beliefs and task demands influence social perspective-taking in irony comprehension during reading. The results revealed that in the irony rating task (Experiment 1), when beliefs conflicted with expectations (counter-stereotypical beliefs) or were ambiguous (neutral beliefs), reading times for ironic sentences in the target region were significantly longer than for literal meanings, indicating an irony effect; however, when speaker beliefs were highly expected classical stereotypical beliefs, the irony effect was not significant. In the comprehension question task (Experiment 2), an irony effect was found only in the spillover region under the neutral belief condition. Individuals' empathic concern ability and implicit...