International Journal of Psychology, 2014 Vol. 49, No. 1, 46 – 50, DOI: 10.1002/ijop.12003 Verbal irony processing: How do contrast and humour correlate? Arnaud Calmus and St ´ ephanie Caillies C2S (EA 6291), University of Reims, Reims, France V erbal irony relies on contrast, that is, incongruity between the situational context and the ironic assertion. But is the degree of contrast related to the perceived humorousness of ironic comments? We answered this question by conducting two experiments. In the first experiment, participants were asked to read a list of sentence pairs (ironic or control) and judge the extent to which the meaning of the first sentence contrasted with that of the second. In the second experiment, participants were invited to rate the humorousness of ironic comments compared with their literal counterparts. Results showed that ironic remarks were rated as more contrasting and more humorous than their literal counterparts, but that humour only emerged from a moderate contrast. Keywords: Verbal irony; Contrast; Humour; Figurative language. Irony is a kind of non-literal language that has no identifiable semantic criteria, in the sense that the semantics of an ironic sentence and a non-ironic one are indistinguishable. For example, saying “He is bright” about an idiot can only be understood as ironic from the context. This feature means that context plays a particularly important role in its understanding. Most theories of irony comprehension converge around the broad notion of contrast, or incongruity, between the ironic assertion and the reality of the situation, generally named the context. This idea of contrast is differently conceptualized in different theories, including Grice’s two-stage model (1989), Gibbs’ direct access approach (1994) and Giora’s graded salience model (1997). Briefly, both the two-stage and the graded salience models assume that the literal meaning is systematically computed during the processing of the ironic comment, while the direct access model posits that the mediation of a literal interpretation may be unnecessary in the case of strong contextual information (Gibbs, 1994). Thus, some authors regard contrast as a conflict between the literal and intended meanings of the ironic utterance (Schwoebel, Dews, Winner, & Srinivas, 2000) or between what is said and what is referred to (Giora, Fein, Ganzi, Alkeslassy- Levi, & Sabah, 2005). They consequently assume that the literal meaning is systematically computed. Others, meanwhile, more generally propose that irony is signalled by a shift in evaluative valence between the context and Correspondence should be addressed to St´ ephanie Caillies, C2S, Universit´ e de Reims, 57 rue Pierre Taittinger, Reims Cedex 51096, France. (E-mail: stephanie.caillies@univ-reims.fr). the ironic statement (Burgers, van Mulken, & Schellens, 2011; Partington, 2007). Without being able to refute the different models, studies investigating incongruity in irony detection or understanding have manipulated the degree of contrast between the context situation, verbally described and the ironic statement (Colston, 2002; Colston & O’Brien, 2000). They have shown that ironic remarks are judged to be more contrasting with their context than their literal counterparts, emphasizing the psychological validity of contrast or incongruity detection in irony. In this study, we investigated the relationship between humour and this notion of contrast in irony processing, asking how humour appreciation and contrast correlate. Humour is one of the main pragmatic functions of irony. Consistent with this, Kreuz, Long, and Church (1991) found that adults were more likely to identify humour as the communication goal of irony than of literal language (see also Roberts & Kreuz, 1994). Humour appreciation is the experience of finding something amusing. It is typically operationalized by subjective funniness ratings provided in response to humorous stimuli (Kozbelt & Nishioka, 2010). We have theoretical reasons to believe that humour appreciation is correlated with the degree of contrast or incongruity between the ironic comment and the context. First, one widely accepted idea about humour is that it is based on incongruity, just like irony. Incongruity, namely the presence of at least two  2013 International Union of Psychological Science