Cognitive Mechanism of Irony in Chinese Text Reading:Influence of Irony on the Focusing Effect of Positive/Negative Quantifiers

By tracking eye movements in "focusing effect" of positive/negative quantifiers on anaphoric reference in an ironic/non-ironic Chinese text reading, the current study is devoted to examining the cognitive mechanism of irony processing.The results suggest that additional efforts are required in irony processing compared with that of non-ironic conditions, that the literal meanings of ironic materials are always activated at the very beginning, and that both the ironic and literal meanings of the text are equally accessible during the final stage of semantic integration.In sum, the finding of the early processing stage for irony is in line with the prediction of the standard pragmatic model while the later stage is in agreement with the graded salience model.