DHH Students' Comprehension of Irony in Self-paced Reading

Irony comprehension can be a kind of challenge to those who are relatively less skillful in reading. To examine how DHH college students (DCSs) were different from hearing college students (HCSs) in the reading of ironic discourses, we conducted two experiments in the self-paced reading task. In Experiment 1, the statement was either literally congruent with the preceding context or had to be understood in an ironic way in each trial; In Experiment 2, the statement was the same but the context was not across the two levels of discourse type. The DCSs generally had a poorer performance than the hearing participants. Although able to comprehend ironies, they had a significantly lower efficiency than their hearing counterparts. The results were consistently in agreement with the prediction of the graded salience hypothesis (Giora, R. (1997). Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics, 7, 183-206. doi:10.1515/cogl.1997.8.3.183) and the parallel-constraint-satisfaction framework (Pexman, P. M. (2008). It's fascinating research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(4)286-290. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00591.x), and the DCSs' performance appears to indicate an amplified version of this support. It is implied that educational environments should be created in which deaf and DHH students are encouraged to do as much reading as possible. Exercises should be designed in helping them to improve vocabulary and syntactic skills in general and to improve skills of inference-making in particular.