Comprehension and memory for nonliteral utterances: The problem of sarcastic indirect requests

Abstract

Three experiments examined understanding and memory for sarcastic indirect requests. Experiment 1 showed that people process sarcastic indirect requests, like I sure love a messy room (meaning ‘Clean up this room’), faster than they comprehend either literal uses of the same sentences, or nonsarcastic indirect requests, like Would you clean up your room? This suggests that people can understand sarcastic utterances without having to analyze the literal meanings of these expressions before figuring out their sarcastic interpretations. The results of experiment 2 showed that people better recognize sarcastic indirect requests than they do nonsarcastic ones. Experiment 3 ruled out the possibility that subjects remembered sarcastic expressions best because of any special intonation properties associated with these utterances. Overall, the results of these studies support the idea that sarcastic utterances are not necessarily more difficult to understand in conversation and that their special pragmatic properties makes them particularly memorable.