The subjective familiarity of English homophones

College students rated 828 homophonic words (words with the same pronunciation but different spellings) in terms of subjective familiarity. High interrater reliability was obtained, and the ratings correlated well with other published familiarity measures (r=.85). The familiarity ratings also correlated highly with log transforms of Kučera and Francis\u27s (1967) printed frequency measures (r= 75). However, many words of equal log frequency varied widely in rated familiarity, and vice versa. To determine which of these two factors was the better predictor of verbal performance, we orthogonally varied the two in a lexical decision task and found that, for words of moderate frequency, rated familiarity was by far the better predictor. We conclude that even though printed frequency and rated familiarity generally covary, printed frequency is a less reliable index of the underlying psychological construct, word familiarity. © 1987 Psychonomic Society, Inc

The use of verbal irony: Cues and constraints

This chapter attempts to elucidate some of the mechanisms that underlie the production and comprehension of verbal irony. It proposes that verbal irony is a constrained phenomenon; that is, there are contextual and interpersonal constraints that govern its use. Technological advances have provided us with forms of communication that lack the cues that are available in face-to-face communication. As we have seen, however, communication is very malleable, and new cues have arisen to signal ironic intent in new media. The typographic devices seen in print, and the affective symbols seen in computer messages, provide new ways of communicating ironic intent. Ironic communication should not be thought of as anomalous or obscure; rather, its use allows us to glimpse important pragmatic principles which lie at the very heart of successful communication

Sarcasm Across Time and Space

Here, we provide data and analysis scripts to support our results for the manuscript: "Sarcasm Across Time and Space: Patterns of Usage by Age, Gender, and Region in the United States.

How to Be Sarcastic: The Echoic Reminder Theory of Verbal Irony

Positive statements, such as A fine friend you are, can readily be used sarcastically. Negative statements, such as You\u27re a terrible friend, can be used sarcastically only under special circumstances. We account for this asymmetry in terms of echoic reminder theory, which asserts that listeners recognize sarcasm when they perceive that a speaker is alluding to some antecedent state of affairs. Positive statements do not require explicit antecedents because such statements may implicitly allude to societal norms and expectations, and these norms are almost invariably positive. Negative statements, however, cannot implicitly allude to such positive norms, and so they should require explicit antecedents if they are to be understood. An explicit victim of a sarcastically intended remark can provide such an antecedent and so should enable negative statements to be used sarcastically. Three experiments, involving scenarios with and without victims, provide support for this theory of sarcastic irony

Coded Data

Here are the original data from this project, as well as a description of the prompts eliciting responses ("Free Response Prompts.xlsx"

Social and paralinguistic cues to sarcasm

Speakers signal sarcastic intent in a variety of ways, including the words they use and the tone of voice they employ. In this paper, we investigate whether facial cues are also used to indicate sarcastic intent. Participants were audioand videotaped as they engaged in tasks designed to elicit sarcasm. In order to assess how facial cues differed in terms of common ground, participant pairs were divided into pairs of friends and strangers. We provide evidence that sarcasm is also signaled by a variety of facial cues, such as movement of the head, eyes, and mouth, and these cues are more commonly employed by friends than by strangers. © Walter de Gruyter

Cues in computer-mediated communication: A corpus analysis

An analysis of five contemporary corpora examines the use of several different cues in four channels of computer-mediated communication. With an in-depth corpus analysis, we show that a wealth of cues is available in online communication, and that these cues are often matched with words that have particular functions and/or semantic meanings. Using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count text analysis software (Pennebaker et al., 2007), we found the two largest categories represented by cue-laden words involved affect and cognitive mechanisms, suggesting that cues are largely used to indicate emotion or to disambiguate a message. We argue that learning the meaning of these cues is central to learning how people communicate nonverbally while online. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved