Penny M Pexman
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 137590 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Penny M Pexman |
| PRENOMES | Penny M |
| SOBRENOME | Pexman |
| ASSINATURA | PEXMAN P M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Calgary |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7130-0973 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 44 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 158 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 44 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1997 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
The Importance of Norm Violation and Relevance for Gossip Appreciation
Social grooming theory posits that relevance is a key feature of gossip whereas prosocial gossip theory emphasizes norm violations. To determine which theory better captures participants’ perceptions of gossip compared to non-gossip, 197 participants viewed 16 videos that varied by statement type (gossip vs. target-present), relevance (relevant vs. irrelevant), and violation (violates norms vs. does not violate norms). Participants rated each spe…
The Effects of Home Recordings and Parent Training in a Community-Based Early Language Intervention
LENA StartTM is a community-based parent education program designed to promote early language development in children from birth to 3 years of age. In this study, the contributions of three intervention components—home recordings, individualized feedback, and parent education—were examined over 10 weeks across three groups: LENA StartTM program (n = 347), Recordings + Feedback (n = 66), and Recordings Only (n = 51). Linear mixed-effects models we…
Learning Irony in School
Irony comprehension requires going beyond literal meaning of words and is challenging for children. In this pre-registered study, we investigated how teaching metapragmatic knowledge in classrooms impacts written irony comprehension in 10-year-old Finnish-speaking children ( n = 41, 21 girls) compared to a control group ( n = 34, 13 girls). At pre-test, children read ironic and literal sentences embedded in stories while their eye movements were …
Individual differences in mentalizing skills and their relationship to concept processing
What we mean when we say semantic
Tulving characterized semantic memory as a vast repository of meaning that underlies language and many other cognitive processes. This perspective on lexical and conceptual knowledge galvanized a new era of research undertaken by numerous fields, each with their own idiosyncratic methods and terminology. For example, “concept” has different meanings in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. As such, many fundamental constructs used to delineate…
Contrasting the organization of concrete and abstract word meanings
Abstract words are hard to acquire; Does social relevance help
The Development of Abstract Word Meanings
Extensive research has shown that children’s early words are learned through sensorimotor experience. Thus, early-acquired words tend to have more concrete meanings. Abstract word meanings tend to be learned later but less is known about their acquisition. We collected meaning-specific concreteness ratings and examined their relationship with age-of-acquisition data from large-scale vocabulary testing with children in grade 2 to college age. Earl…
Who gets it? Explaining variability in children’s written irony comprehension
Understanding verbal irony involves detecting that the speaker's intended meaning contrasts with the literal meaning. This is challenging for children as the underlying skills required to understand irony may not be fully developed. We investigated how 10-year-olds' working memory, empathy skills, and gender were related to their processing and comprehension of written irony. Data from two previous eye-tracking experiments with 97 children (46 gi…
Understanding with the body? Testing the role of verb relative embodiment across tasks at the interface of language and memory
Multiple representation accounts of conceptual knowledge argue that information associated with sensory-motor experience, in addition to pure linguistic information, contributes to word processing. A number of issues, however, remain under-investigated, including the extent to which these dimensions affect verb processing (rather than nouns), especially in languages other than English, and their role across different tasks along the language-memo…
Would you hire Liam over Kirk? Name sound symbolism and hiring
The role of emotion in acquisition of verb meaning
Children's earliest acquired words are often learned through sensorimotor experience, but it is less clear how children learn the meaning of concepts whose referents are less associated with sensorimotor experience. The Affective Embodiment Account postulates that children use emotional experience to learn more abstract word meanings. There is mixed evidence for this account; analyses using mega-study datasets suggest that negative or positively …
Unseen but influential associates
Mapping semantic space
Multiple representation theories posit that concepts are represented via a combination of properties derived from sensorimotor, affective, and linguistic experiences. Recently, it has been proposed that information derived from social experience, or socialness, represents another key aspect of conceptual representation. How these various dimensions interact to form a coherent conceptual space has yet to be fully explored. To address this, we capi…
Training studies provide new insights about mechanisms of irony development
In verbal irony, there is a contrast between the literal meaning of what is stated and the intended meaning of the words. As successful comprehension of irony requires going beyond lexical meaning, the ability to understand it tends to develop late compared to literal language and it is challenging for children. Numerous explanations have been proposed for the late development of irony comprehension, including emerging language and perspective-ta…
Beware influential findings that have not been replicated
Meaning in hand
Children's processing of written irony
Ironic language is challenging for many people to understand, and particularly for children. Comprehending irony is considered a major milestone in children's development, as it requires inferring the intentions of the person who is being ironic. However, the theories of irony comprehension generally do not address developmental changes, and there are limited data on children's processing of verbal irony. In the present pre-registered study, we e…
Higher order factors of sound symbolism
Sound symbolism refers to associations between certain language sounds (i.e., phonemes) and perceptual and/or semantic properties. Crucially, the different associations of a phoneme do not appear to be wholly independent. For instance, the phoneme /i/ is associated with sharpness, smallness and brightness. Previous work has shown that these properties are all related to one another (Walker et al., 2012). This suggests that higher order factors ma…
Heterogenous abstract concepts
An investigation of iconic language development in four datasets
Iconic words imitate their meanings. Previous work has demonstrated that iconic words are more common in infants’ early speech, and in adults’ child-directed speech (e.g., Perry et al., 2015; 2018). This is consistent with the proposal that iconicity provides a benefit to word learning. Here we explored iconicity in four diverse language development datasets: a production corpus for infants and preschoolers (MacWhinney, 2000), comprehension data …
Sound symbolism shapes the English language
Heterogeneity in abstract verbs
It has been well documented that different types of nouns and action verbs are associated with behavioral and neural differences. In contrast, abstract verbs (e.g., think, dissolve) are often treated as a homogeneous category. We compared event-related potentials recorded during a syntactic classification task of four verb types; 1) abstract mental, 2) abstract emotional, 3) abstract nonbodily, and 4) concrete. Abstract nonbodily state verbs show…
Sarcasm between siblings
Addressing the Challenge of Verbal Irony
In verbal irony, the speaker's intended meaning can be counterfactual to the literal meaning of their words. This form of figurative language can help speakers achieve a number of communicative aims, but also presents an interpretive challenge for some listeners. There is debate about the skills that support the acquisition of irony comprehension in typical development, and about why verbal irony presents a challenge for many individuals, includi…
Does Sarcasm Always Sting? Investigating the Impact of Ironic Insults and Ironic Compliments
In previous research, there have been inconsistent findings regarding interpretation of ironic insults. Colston (1997) reported that irony enhances the criticism conveyed by a more direct insult, but Dews and Winner (1995; Dews, Kaplan & Winner, 1995) reported that irony mutes the criticism conveyed by more direct insult. In this study we examined the possibility that the perception of ironic insults depends on whether participants were asked to …
Context Incongruity and Irony Processing
In this research we investigated the role of context in interpretation (Experiments 1 and 2) and relative processing (Experiment 3) of literal and ironic statements. As such, we manipulated degree of situational negativity (using strongly negative, weakly negative, and neutral contexts) and found that, in strongly negative situations, reading times for ironic statements were slower than for literal statements, whereas in weakly negative situation…
Discourse Factors That Influence Online Reading of Metaphor and Irony
Statements such as "children are precious gems" can be interpreted as either a metaphor (children are valuable) or as a sarcastic comment on the metaphor (children are a burden). Katz and Pexman (1997) identified several constraints that biased readers toward either the metaphoric or the sarcastic-ironic interpretation: nature (occupation) of the person making the statement, whether the statement was counterfactual to information in the preceding…
How Sarcastic are You
In the present research, the authors examined the effects of self-perceived use of sarcasm on the production, interpretation, and processing of verbal irony. Accordingly, they first devised and evaluated a sarcasm self-report scale (SSS). In Experiment 1, results showed that participants' self-perceived use of sarcastic irony (as assessed by the SSS) predicted their use of ironic statements in a production task and was related to their interpreta…
Children's Perceptions of the Social Functions of Verbal Irony
Verbal irony can serve many social functions: Speakers can mute the aggression conveyed by criticism or temper the praise conveyed by a compliment (the Tinge Hypothesis; Dews, Kaplan, & Winner, 1995), and speakers can also bring humor to a situation. A full understanding of ironic language requires one to make complex inferences about speaker intent, a task that can be challenging for children. This study was devised as a developmental test of th…
Understanding Irony
Katz and Pexman reported that certain occupations (e.g., comedian) were associated with ironic speech and that participants rated metaphors as more sarcastic when speakers were members of such occupations. In the present research, the authors investigated whether speaker occupation was a cue to ironic intent when the statements were not metaphors (e.g., literal statements such as "you are a wonderful friend, " potentially an ironic insult, and "y…
An Acquired Taste
Around 5 or 6 years of age, children begin to recognize that speakers who make ironic remarks do not believe what they literally say, but children of the same age do not show appreciation for the humor function of irony (Dews et al., 1996; Harris & Pexman, 2003). We investigated 7- to 10-year-old children's interpretations of verbal irony and focused on factors that might modulate children's impressions of humor in irony. Results showed that (a) …
Understanding Verbal Irony
Recently, irony researchers have emphasized that irony interpretation involves metarepresentational inferencing in order that the perceiver can determine whether the speaker's attitude is counterfactual to their statement. This research investigated whether the perception of irony also depends on the extent to which an ironic statement is suitably face-threatening in its particular context. Target statements were direct and indirect ironic remark…
Sarcasm between siblings
Should Be Fun-Not
According to Kreuz's principle of inferability, speakers tend to employ nonliteral language when it can reasonably be perceived by their conversational partner. In a computer-mediated communicative setting, such as e-mail, this suggests that the e-mail writer might use discourse tools that facilitate comprehension on the part of the recipient. The present study examined rates of usage for various forms of nonliteral language in 210 e-mail message…
Cultural Influences on Categorization Processes
Chiu (1972) reported that in a categorization task, Chinese children were more likely to categorize objects based on shared relationships, whereas American children were more likely to categorize objects based on similarity. This research examines whether such findings generalize to adults and whether cultural differences would also be observed in the activation of semantic concepts. In Experiment 1, Chinese adults were equally likely to categori…
Irony Comprehension in Action
There are now a number of theories of irony processing: Modular accounts suggest the literal meaning is usually accessed first and the ironic meaning considered later, whereas interactive accounts suggest the ironic meaning is considered in the earliest moments of processing. We used a visual world paradigm to examine the issue of how ironic meaning is processed from speech. Participants heard literal and ironic statements and, for each statement…
How Do Children Respond to Verbal Irony in Face-to-Face Communication? The Development of Mode Adoption Across Middle Childhood
A number of studies have now examined the development of children's appreciation for verbal irony, typically by testing children's comprehension of the ironic speaker's belief and intent. This article examines a topic that has received much less attention: children's ability to produce irony in context-appropriate ways. The study presents 7- to 11-year-olds with brief stories that were each followed by an experimenter's literal or ironic remark. …
The role of emotion in acquisition of verb meaning
Children's earliest acquired words are often learned through sensorimotor experience, but it is less clear how children learn the meaning of concepts whose referents are less associated with sensorimotor experience. The Affective Embodiment Account postulates that children use emotional experience to learn more abstract word meanings. There is mixed evidence for this account; analyses using mega-study datasets suggest that negative or positively …
Addressing the Challenge of Verbal Irony
In verbal irony, the speaker's intended meaning can be counterfactual to the literal meaning of their words. This form of figurative language can help speakers achieve a number of communicative aims, but also presents an interpretive challenge for some listeners. There is debate about the skills that support the acquisition of irony comprehension in typical development, and about why verbal irony presents a challenge for many individuals, includi…
Interpreting Figurative Statements
Quintilian (35-100 AD; trans. 1959) pointed out that we use knowledge of the speaker in attributing ironic intent. We examine this possibility by studying the interpretation given to statements of the form "Children are precious gems," in which the speaker could intend to make either a metaphor or a sarcastic-ironic comment on the metaphor. In two studies, we show that the speaker's occupation can influence our interpretation of a figurative stat…
Discourse Factors That Influence Online Reading of Metaphor and Irony
Statements such as "children are precious gems" can be interpreted as either a metaphor (children are valuable) or as a sarcastic comment on the metaphor (children are a burden). Katz and Pexman (1997) identified several constraints that biased readers toward either the metaphoric or the sarcastic-ironic interpretation: nature (occupation) of the person making the statement, whether the statement was counterfactual to information in the preceding…
Does Sarcasm Always Sting? Investigating the Impact of Ironic Insults and Ironic Compliments
In previous research, there have been inconsistent findings regarding interpretation of ironic insults. Colston (1997) reported that irony enhances the criticism conveyed by a more direct insult, but Dews and Winner (1995; Dews, Kaplan & Winner, 1995) reported that irony mutes the criticism conveyed by more direct insult. In this study we examined the possibility that the perception of ironic insults depends on whether participants were asked to …
Understanding Irony
Katz and Pexman reported that certain occupations (e.g., comedian) were associated with ironic speech and that participants rated metaphors as more sarcastic when speakers were members of such occupations. In the present research, the authors investigated whether speaker occupation was a cue to ironic intent when the statements were not metaphors (e.g., literal statements such as "you are a wonderful friend, " potentially an ironic insult, and "y…
Context Incongruity and Irony Processing
In this research we investigated the role of context in interpretation (Experiments 1 and 2) and relative processing (Experiment 3) of literal and ironic statements. As such, we manipulated degree of situational negativity (using strongly negative, weakly negative, and neutral contexts) and found that, in strongly negative situations, reading times for ironic statements were slower than for literal statements, whereas in weakly negative situation…
Children's Perceptions of the Social Functions of Verbal Irony
Verbal irony can serve many social functions: Speakers can mute the aggression conveyed by criticism or temper the praise conveyed by a compliment (the Tinge Hypothesis; Dews, Kaplan, & Winner, 1995), and speakers can also bring humor to a situation. A full understanding of ironic language requires one to make complex inferences about speaker intent, a task that can be challenging for children. This study was devised as a developmental test of th…
Does Irony Go Better With Friends
Common ground between speaker and addressee is thought to be important to comprehension of verbal irony (e.g., Gibbs, 1986). We investigated the effects of one type of common ground (solidary relationships, which are close, liking, and mutually supportive) on production and interpretation of ironic insults and ironic compliments. The relationship manipulation (solidary vs. nonsolidary) influenced participants' ratings of several pragmatic functio…
How Sarcastic are You
In the present research, the authors examined the effects of self-perceived use of sarcasm on the production, interpretation, and processing of verbal irony. Accordingly, they first devised and evaluated a sarcasm self-report scale (SSS). In Experiment 1, results showed that participants' self-perceived use of sarcastic irony (as assessed by the SSS) predicted their use of ironic statements in a production task and was related to their interpreta…
An Acquired Taste
Around 5 or 6 years of age, children begin to recognize that speakers who make ironic remarks do not believe what they literally say, but children of the same age do not show appreciation for the humor function of irony (Dews et al., 1996; Harris & Pexman, 2003). We investigated 7- to 10-year-old children's interpretations of verbal irony and focused on factors that might modulate children's impressions of humor in irony. Results showed that (a) …
Cultural Influences on Categorization Processes
Chiu (1972) reported that in a categorization task, Chinese children were more likely to categorize objects based on shared relationships, whereas American children were more likely to categorize objects based on similarity. This research examines whether such findings generalize to adults and whether cultural differences would also be observed in the activation of semantic concepts. In Experiment 1, Chinese adults were equally likely to categori…
Children's Use of Trait Information in Understanding Verbal Irony
We investigated whether providing information about a speaker's personality traits would influence children's interpretations and processing of verbal irony. In Experiment 1, 5- to 6-year-olds demonstrated strong understanding of personality traits and limited understanding of ironic remarks when the two were tested independently. In Experiment 2, 5- to 8-year-old children were provided with trait information about the speaker that was either con…
It's Fascinating Research
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 …
“That Was Smooth, Mom”
Research suggests that typically developing children begin to understand verbal irony around 5 or 6 years of age. Children's production of verbal irony, however, has not previously been examined. This study was a preliminary investigation of children's irony production, including both verbal and gestural (nonverbal) forms. We coded instances of irony in interactions within 118 family triads, each consisting of 1 parent and 2 children, aged 3 to 1…
Should Be Fun-Not
According to Kreuz's principle of inferability, speakers tend to employ nonliteral language when it can reasonably be perceived by their conversational partner. In a computer-mediated communicative setting, such as e-mail, this suggests that the e-mail writer might use discourse tools that facilitate comprehension on the part of the recipient. The present study examined rates of usage for various forms of nonliteral language in 210 e-mail message…
Development of children's ability to distinguish sarcasm and verbal irony
Adults distinguish between ironic remarks directed at targets (sarcasm) and ironic remarks not directed at specific targets. We investigated the development of children's appreciation for this distinction by presenting these speech acts to 71 five- to six-year-olds and 71 nine- to ten-year-olds. Five- to six-year-olds were beginning to understand the non-literal meanings of sarcastic speakers and ironic speakers but did not distinguish ironic and…
How Do Children Respond to Verbal Irony in Face-to-Face Communication? The Development of Mode Adoption Across Middle Childhood
A number of studies have now examined the development of children's appreciation for verbal irony, typically by testing children's comprehension of the ironic speaker's belief and intent. This article examines a topic that has received much less attention: children's ability to produce irony in context-appropriate ways. The study presents 7- to 11-year-olds with brief stories that were each followed by an experimenter's literal or ironic remark. …
Understanding Verbal Irony
Recently, irony researchers have emphasized that irony interpretation involves metarepresentational inferencing in order that the perceiver can determine whether the speaker's attitude is counterfactual to their statement. This research investigated whether the perception of irony also depends on the extent to which an ironic statement is suitably face-threatening in its particular context. Target statements were direct and indirect ironic remark…
Irony Comprehension in Action
There are now a number of theories of irony processing: Modular accounts suggest the literal meaning is usually accessed first and the ironic meaning considered later, whereas interactive accounts suggest the ironic meaning is considered in the earliest moments of processing. We used a visual world paradigm to examine the issue of how ironic meaning is processed from speech. Participants heard literal and ironic statements and, for each statement…
Addressing the Challenge of Verbal Irony
In verbal irony, the speaker's intended meaning can be counterfactual to the literal meaning of their words. This form of figurative language can help speakers achieve a number of communicative aims, but also presents an interpretive challenge for some listeners. There is debate about the skills that support the acquisition of irony comprehension in typical development, and about why verbal irony presents a challenge for many individuals, includi…
Learning Labels for Objects
Theories of embodied cognition propose that sensorimotor experience is essential to learning, representing, and accessing conceptual information. Embodied effects have been observed in early child development and adult cognitive processing, but there has been less research examining the role of embodiment in later childhood. We conducted two experiments to test whether degree of sensorimotor experience modulates children's word learning. In Exper…
Heterogeneity in abstract verbs
It has been well documented that different types of nouns and action verbs are associated with behavioral and neural differences. In contrast, abstract verbs (e.g., think, dissolve) are often treated as a homogeneous category. We compared event-related potentials recorded during a syntactic classification task of four verb types; 1) abstract mental, 2) abstract emotional, 3) abstract nonbodily, and 4) concrete. Abstract nonbodily state verbs show…
Sarcasm between siblings
Sound symbolism shapes the English language
Higher order factors of sound symbolism
Sound symbolism refers to associations between certain language sounds (i.e., phonemes) and perceptual and/or semantic properties. Crucially, the different associations of a phoneme do not appear to be wholly independent. For instance, the phoneme /i/ is associated with sharpness, smallness and brightness. Previous work has shown that these properties are all related to one another (Walker et al., 2012). This suggests that higher order factors ma…
Heterogenous abstract concepts
Psychology (41 obras) · Linguistics (35 obras) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (31 obras) · Cognitive psychology (28 obras) · Irony (23 obras) · Philosophy (15 obras) · Social Psychology (14 obras) · Computer Science (13 obras) · Comprehension (12 obras) · Developmental psychology (12 obras)