Irony Comprehension in the Nonnative Language Comes at a Cost

Irony as a communicative phenomenon continues to puzzle. One of the key questions concerns cognitive and linguistic mechanisms underpinning irony comprehension. Empirical research exploring how much time people need to grasp irony as compared to literal meanings, brought equivocal answers. In view of the timespan-oriented-approach’ inconclusiveness, we set to explore the efficiency of irony online processing in a limited-response-time paradigm. Additionally, we aimed to find out whether advanced nonnative users of a language, who have mastered ironic mode of thinking in their native language, get irony as efficiently in their nonnative as they do in their native language. Results show that participants were less efficient in processing irony than nonirony in both tested languages, yet the efficiency decreased in their nonnative language. These results license a claim that irony is a cognitively more demanding communicative phenomenon than literal meaning, and the effort invested in its comprehension increases in the nonnative language.