CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
It’s Fascinating Research
The Cognition of Verbal Irony
Penny M. Pexman
University of Calgary
ABSTRACT—Verbal irony is nonliteral language that makes
salient a discrepancy between expectations and reality.
For researchers who study verbal irony, a critical question
is: How do we grasp the meaning of ironic language? The
parallel-constraint-satisfaction approach holds promise
as an answer to this question. By this account, multiple
cues to ironic intent, such as tone of voice, incongruity, and
knowledge of the speaker, are processed rapidly and in
parallel and this information is coordinated with the
utterance itself in order to construct a coherent interpre-
tation that is the best fit for the activated information.
Recently, research with individuals who struggle with
irony comprehension (typically developing children, indi-
viduals with autism-spectrum disorder, individuals with
brain injury) has provided new clues about the complex
process by which ironic meaning is inferred.
KEYWORDS—verbal irony; sarcasm; figurative language;
parallel constraint satisfaction; communicative intent;
humor
Imagine that you have boarded a transatlantic flight and are
waiting for pushback, when the pilot announces that departure
will be delayed. Your traveling companion turns to you and
says ‘‘Fantastic! We’ll get to spend more time on this plane.’’ In
deciding what the speaker means by this remark, you will
likely consider the speaker’s choice of words, tone of voice,
facial expression, attitude about flying (does he or she have
a love of close quarters and in-flight snacks?), and various
other cues. After weighing this information you will likely
decide that the remark is not intended to be taken literally.
Instead, it is intended as irony, a nonliteral utterance used to
highlight a discrepancy between expected or desired outcomes
and reality.
Address correspondence to Penny M. Pexman, Department of Psy-
chology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary,
Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4; e-mail: pexman@ucalgary.ca.
286 Copyright r 2008 Association for Psychological Science
Irony depends on the fact that things do not always turn out as
hoped or as expected. Our expectations tend to be positive
(Perloff, 1987), so failed expectations usually involve things
going less well than expected: Your plane is delayed, it rains on
your picnic, you don’t win the lottery. Verbal irony provides a
means of highlighting failed expectations or dashed hopes, in
terms of our own and others’ behavior, or the outcome of events.
As a result, ironic remarks tend to be negative, but ironic intent
is not necessarily negative. One can also use irony to highlight
the fact that things have turned out even better than expected:
For instance, you might say ‘‘That’s rotten luck’’ to a friend who
has just won a large cash prize in a drawing.
Irony is not new; the term’s origins are traced to the tradition of
Greek comedy, and to Socrates and his practice of feigning ig-
norance and using understatement in order to reveal weakness
in the arguments of an adversary (Hutchens, 1960). Further, ironic
language is not strictly a Western phenomenon (e.g., Okamoto,
2002). It is used with some frequency in everyday language; Gibbs
(2000) reported that irony was used on 8% of turns in conversa-
tions between friends. At the same time, to be ironic is to take a
risk (Gibbs & Colston, 2001). Since irony involves saying some-
thing that is not literally true, the risk is that the meaning may
not be perceived as intended. The statement may be interpreted
to mean something opposite to the meaning intended.
Given the ambiguity inherent in ironic language, the puzzle for
researchers has been to understand how we grasp the meaning
of ironic remarks. Certainly, the process is complex. The per-
ceiver must draw inferences from the speaker’s words, judge the
speaker’s attitude about the situation and about his or her
words, and assess how the speaker intends his or her words to
be perceived by others. A number of theories of irony have
been proposed by researchers in different fields, including
psychology, philosophy, and linguistics (for a review, see Gibbs
& Colston, 2007). Each of these solutions, however, has been
criticized for explaining only a piece of the puzzle—for instance,
the social functions of ironic language (but not the cognitive
processes involved) or the comprehension of particular sub-
types of irony (but not all subtypes). Recently, an overarching
and potentially unifying framework has emerged (e.g., Katz,
2005).
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 Penny M. Pexman
IRONY COMPREHENSION AS CONSTRAINT
SATISFACTION
According to some earlier models, irony can be detected only
after the literal meaning has been processed and rejected. The
constraint-satisfaction approach, in contrast, suggests that cues
are processed rapidly and in parallel and an ironic interpretation
is considered as soon as there is sufficient evidence that it might
be supported. This framework is similar to a solution that has
been applied to many other types of ambiguity resolution, for
which people make decisions or judgments based on complex
and ambiguous information (for a review, see Thagard, 2000);
these include interpretation of ambiguous images, visual word
recognition, syntactic ambiguity resolution, cognitive disso-
nance, and decision making.
Parallel constraint satisfaction can be instantiated in a con-
nectionist neural network, with the interconnected units in the
network representing possible solutions for the comprehension
problem. In processing the comprehension problem, activations of
units in the model are adjusted by a relaxation mechanism until
the network settles into a stable state. When the model achieves
a stable state of activation, comprehension is achieved. The final
state of the system represents the best solution to the compre-
hension problem given the input and also the knowledge captured
in the connections between units in the network. In the case of
irony comprehension (Fig. 1), the message is processed along with
multiple cues from context, and, through constraint satisfaction,
the system settles on a coherent interpretation of the utterance.
Evidence for this kind of processing comes from a self-paced
reading study reported by Pexman, Ferretti, and Katz (2000).
Pexman et al. presented participants with short text passages in
which one character made a remark to another about an event.
Cues to ironic intent were described in the text and word-by-
word reading times were measured. Results showed that reading
times varied (as a function of the cues) in the earliest moments of
processing the remarks, suggesting that participants were inte-
grating all available information as soon as it was relevant, in
order to derive a coherent representation of the speaker’s intent.
The constraint-satisfaction approach seems to have potential
as an explanatory framework for irony comprehension. At
present, a weakness of this approach is that it is not sufficiently
specific. In part, this is because we do not fully understand all of
the cues and cognitive achievements that support the process of
irony comprehension. Recently, however, new insights have
been provided by research with populations who struggle to
comprehend ironic language, including typically developing
children and individuals with autism or brain injury.
IRONY COMPREHENSION AND TYPICALLY
DEVELOPING CHILDREN
At about 5 or 6 years of age, typically developing children begin
to understand that an ironic speaker intends a meaning different
Volume 17—Number 4
Fig. 1. The parallel-constraint-satisfaction framework for verbal irony
interpretation. Multiple cues are activated by a statement (e.g., ‘‘Fan-
tastic! We’ll get to spend more time on this plane’’; bottom), and these cues
are considered in parallel. The possible interpretations are represented in
the interpretation space (top). The representations in the interpretation
space are depicted as they would appear at the start of processing for the
statement. By the constraint satisfaction process, the system would settle
on one of the possible interpretations (i.e., that the statement is a literal
compliment, an ironic criticism, or a lie). If the activated cues support an
ironic interpretation, the ironic-criticism interpretation would, over time,
receive more activation and the other interpretive possibilities would be
deactivated. Deactivation would be achieved by the inhibitory connections
between interpretive possibilities. Connections between cues and inter-
pretations (which, for simplicity, are not depicted) would be weighted to
reflect learned predictability or reliability of the different cues.
from that literally conveyed by his or her words (for a review, see
Pexman & Glenwright, 2007). Children’s appreciation for the
forms and functions of irony continues to develop into adoles-
cence. Like adults, children can use a number of cues to judge
whether a speaker intends to be ironic. There is evidence that
children’s judgments of ironic intent can be influenced by the
speaker’s tone of voice and by the extent to which a statement
echoes stated or implicit expectations for event outcomes.
Further, children’s impressions of speaker intent for irony are
modulated by what they know about the speaker’s personality;
if told that the speaker of a statement like ‘‘you are so careful’’ is a
mean person (vs. a nice person), children are more likely to judge
that the speaker is intending to be ironic (Pexman, Glenwright,
Hala, Kowbel, & Jungen, 2006). Children do not seem to
consider any of these cues to be necessary conditions for irony.
Rather, in making judgments about speaker intent, children
consider and integrate multiple cues. This type of cue integra-
tion is consistent with a constraint-satisfaction framework
for irony comprehension, but does not rule out literal-first
processing. The predictions of constraint satisfaction and literal-
first accounts could be better differentiated by examining
children’s processing of ironic remarks.
The methods used in studies of adults’ irony processing (e.g., self-
paced reading) are not ideal for children. As such, researchers have
devised other ways to study the processes involved in children’s
language comprehension. For instance, tasks have been devised in
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 Verbal Irony
Fig. 2. Procedure used to measure children’s processing of ironic lan-
guage (Climie & Pexman, in press). The experimenter (top) sits across a
small table from the participant (bottom). A video camera is positioned to
monitor the participant’s eye gaze. The experimenter presents a series of
short puppet shows to the participant. Each show ends with one puppet
making an ironic or literal remark. For each remark, the child judges
whether the speaker intended to be nice or mean, and indicates this
judgment by picking up the corresponding response object and placing it in
the answer box (nice 5 duck, mean 5 shark). By monitoring children’s eye
gaze, it is possible to draw inferences about the extent to which children
consider each interpretation as they reason about speaker intent.
which children respond to spoken language by moving objects in
an array. The array is structured such that different objects are
appropriate to different interpretations of an utterance. Children’s
eye movements are monitored as they listen to the spoken words
and decide which object should be selected. The number and
duration of children’s looks to each object are assumed to reflect the
extent to which children considered each interpretation in the
comprehension process (e.g., Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip,
1999). We recently devised such a task in order to study children’s
processing of ironic remarks. Children were first trained to asso-
ciate the intent to be nice with a smiling yellow duck and the intent
to be mean with a snarling gray shark. When children judged that a
speaker said something nice they were to place the duck in an
answer box and when a speaker said something mean to place the
shark in the answer box. Children were then presented with literal
and ironic remarks in the context of short puppet shows (Fig. 2).
After each remark, the children were asked whether the speaker
was like the shark or the duck. We recorded eye movements to each
response object as children made their judgments.
288
This procedure allowed us to test whether children’s pro-
cessing of irony fits better with the literal-first or the parallel-
constraint-satisfaction framework (Climie & Pexman, in press).
Contrary to the literal-first account, we found no evidence that
children looked first to the ‘‘literal’’ response object when
judging speaker intent for ironic statements. Instead, results
showed that even the youngest children in our sample (5-year-
olds) almost always looked first to the ‘‘ironic’’ response object
following ironic statements, matching the frequency with which
they looked first to the ‘‘literal’’ response object following literal
statements. These findings suggest that children consider ironic
intent in the earliest moments of processing, lending support
to parallel constraint satisfaction as a model for children’s
processing of ironic language.
It has been suggested that children’s understanding of an
ironic speaker’s intent depends on their theory-of-mind skills.
Filippova and Astington (in press) reported that children’s
performance on a second-order false-belief task (a measure of
advanced theory-of-mind understanding, assumed to measure
second-order mental-state reasoning because a child must track
what one person thinks another person thinks) was a significant
predictor of irony comprehension. These recursive mental-state
inferences may be important component skills for irony com-
prehension and could be incorporated in a constraint-satisfac-
tion model of irony comprehension as factors that influence
activated cues (Fig. 1). With a capacity for second-order mental-
state reasoning, children are likely to include the speaker’s
beliefs about the listener’s or target’s beliefs as cues to inter-
pretation. As such, the ability to make inferences about others’
minds creates the possibility of ironic interpretation. While
this type of cognitive ability may support irony comprehension, it
is likely not a sufficient condition for irony understanding. That
is, social experience with ironic language is also important.
Children need to have opportunities to experience and observe
ironic language and reactions to it in order to construct a mental
category for this type of utterance.
IRONY COMPREHENSION AND ATYPICAL
POPULATIONS
Individuals With Autism
There is evidence that individuals with autism have difficulty un-
derstanding ironic language, and this difficulty has been attributed
to impaired theory of mind (Papp, 2006). This difficulty with
irony comprehension could also stem from a broader impairment
of executive control (a set of cognitive skills that includes inhib-
itory control, planning, attentional flexibility, error detection,
and resistance to interference; Carlson, 2005). Either of these
explanations could be incorporated in the constraint-satisfac-
tion framework. That is, either impaired theory-of-mind skills
or executive dysfunction could lead to activation of partial or
inaccurate information about the speaker’s beliefs and intent,
resulting in misinterpretation of ironic language.
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 Penny M. Pexman
Additional insights about irony comprehension are provided
by findings reported by Wang, Lee, Sigman, and Dapretto (2006).
Wang et al. used brain imaging (functional magnetic resonance
imaging, fMRI) to examine neural activity associated with pro-
cessing ironic language. Results showed that, while typically
developing children and children with autism-spectrum disor-
der relied on the same network of areas in order to make judg-
ments of speaker intent, children with autism showed stronger
recruitment of prefrontal and temporal regions. The authors
concluded that this could be attributed to more effortful
processing for children with autism—in particular, more effort
expended in the process of integrating contextual cues with the
utterance information in order to interpret speaker intent.
Individuals With Brain Injury
Irony-comprehension difficulties have also been demonstrated
for some individuals with brain injury. For instance, Martin and
McDonald (2005) compared the performance of patients with
traumatic brain injury to a control group of healthy adults on
tests of irony comprehension, theory of mind, and executive
functioning. While patients with traumatic brain injury showed
some impairment on all of these tasks, the only significant pre-
dictor of irony comprehension was performance on the non-
mental inferencing task, an executive-functioning measure that
requires multiple-step nonmental inferences (inferences drawn
from cause and effect reasoning, such as where to look for a lost
object). Martin and McDonald concluded that the poor irony
comprehension demonstrated by patients with traumatic brain
injury is not due to specific deficits in theory of mind but rather to
more general problems with executive-function abilities.
Similarly, Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer, Berger, Goldsher, and Aha-
ron-Peretz (2005) described a group of patients with intact second-
order theory-of-mind skills but impaired irony comprehension.
Shamay-Tsoory et al. argued that this dissociation arises because
irony comprehension requires a higher level of emotional
processing than does the second-order false-belief task. Irony
comprehension depends on integration of cognitive and emotional
inferences. Since these patients all had damage in the ventrome-
dial prefrontal cortex, this area may be the locus of this integration.
These studies with brain-injured adults suggest that irony
comprehension depends on more than theory-of-mind skills. Yet
the developmental research suggests that theory of mind is
important to development of irony appreciation. One possibility
is that theory-of-mind understanding supports initial develop-
ment of irony appreciation and that additional cognitive and
emotional inferences support the further refinement of irony
appreciation into adulthood.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
In order to refine the constraint-satisfaction framework for verbal
irony we need to better understand the cues that are important to
Volume 17—Number 4
irony interpretation for both children and adults. For instance,
differences in the reliability of these cues need to be deter-
mined and incorporated in the framework, such that more
predictive cues are given stronger weights in the constraint-
satisfaction process. This work will likely be facilitated by
advances in processing-time measures and neuroimaging
technology. These tools will provide finer-grained analyses of
the activation and integration that occurs in the process of
understanding irony.
The constraint-satisfaction approach described here for ver-
bal irony holds promise as an explanatory framework for closely
related phenomena such as recognition of situational irony
(e.g., Shelley, 2001) and nonverbal irony (for example, sarcastic
clapping at a referee’s bad call). Further, it may offer a useful
framework for phenomena like deception, faux pas, and hy-
pocrisy. In all of these cases, comprehension is achieved when
multiple cues are integrated to derive a coherent interpretation.
Verbal irony will continue to be a salient feature of everyday
communication, and one that poses challenges for some mem-
bers of society. The findings from research on children and adults
who struggle with irony comprehension highlight the demands of
this process. Irony understanding depends on complex social,
emotional, and cognitive inferences that are made possible by a
comprehension system that is capable of rapid coordination
of this information and by knowledge of a broad range of inter-
pretive possibilities.
Recommended Reading
Gibbs, R.W., & Colston, H.L. (Eds.). (2007). (See References). A col-
lection of articles that have advanced irony research, as well as
useful synthesis and points for future research.
Read, S.J., & Miller, L.C. (Eds.). (1998). Connectionist models of social
reasoning and behavior. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. A collection of
papers that provide examples of social-reasoning problems to
which the constraint-satisfaction approach has been applied.
Thagard, P. (2000). (See References). A comprehensive description of
the theory of coherence as constraint satisfaction.
REFERENCES
Carlson, S.M. (2005). Developmentally sensitive measures of executive
function in preschool children. Developmental Neuropsychology,
28, 595–616.
Climie, E.A., & Pexman, P.M. (in press). Eye gaze provides a window on
children’s understanding of verbal irony. Journal of Cognition and
Development.
Filippova, E., & Astington, J.W. (in press). Further development in
social reasoning revealed in discourse irony understanding. Child
Development.
Gibbs, R.W. (2000). Irony in talk among friends. Metaphor & Symbol,
15, 5–27.
Gibbs, R.W., & Colston, H.L. (2001). The risks and rewards of ironic
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Hutchens, E.N. (1960). The identification of irony. ELH: A Journal
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Katz, A.N. (2005). Discourse and sociocultural factors in understanding
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Okamoto, S. (2002). Politeness and the perception of irony: Honorifics
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prosody and context. Brain, 129, 932–943.
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