Rethinking (Assumptions About) Irony: The Bilingual Factor

People differ in irony comprehension. Studies reported that ironic meanings may both be processed faster and slower than literal ones. Although numerous hypotheses were tested, the inconsistent findings remain unexplained. It may be that people process irony with different efficiency because they differ in cognitive capacities, inferential skills, and communication-related social experiences. I argue to revise assumptions and reframe conceptualizations of irony set up between the delayed and direct access and examine irony from a novel perspective. So far, irony explorations have been anchored in the monolingual model of communication. Yet, monolingualism is no longer the communicative norm. The shift to bilingualism produces a new default language user: the bilingual. This shift is relevant for irony exploration: bilinguals exhibit different sets of socio-cognitive skills and communicative experiences than monolinguals. This provides an opportunity to look at irony from a new—bilingual—perspective and examine what it tells us about the process of irony comprehension.