关键词: 观点采择, 反语, 性别刻板印象, 语用, 个体差异

Abstract: Successful communication relies on perspective-taking—the ability to infer a speaker’s intentions by representing their beliefs and attitudes. A central theoretical issue concerns whether this process is automatic or effortful, reflecting the broader debate between serial and constraint-based models of language processing. While serial models posit an initial egocentric bias followed by later adjustment, constraint-based models assume that perspective is integrated in parallel with other linguistic cues from the outset. To examine how social context and task demands shape perspective-taking during irony comprehension, this study employed a 3 (speaker’s belief: classically gender-stereotypical, counter-stereotypical, neutral)×2 (utterance type: ironic, literal) within-participants design. Participants read scenarios composed of six segments (Background, Belief, Event, Target, Spillover, and Conclusion). The experimental materials were identical across conditions except for the Belief and Event segments, in which critical variations were introduced. Two self-paced reading experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, participants provided explicit irony judgments on a 5-point scale followed by yes/no comprehension questions. Experiment 2 employed only yes/no comprehension questions for attention monitoring, without the irony rating task. Individual differences were also assessed across multiple domains: implicit and explicit gender attitudes (via the IAT and CMSS, respectively), social cognitive abilities (via the IRI Scale), and executive functions (via the Stroop task and a working memory capacity task). In Experiment 1, an irony effect (longer reading times for ironic than literal utterances) was observed in the target region when the speaker's beliefs were counter-stereotypical or neutral, but no such effect emerged when beliefs were classically stereotypical. The absence of an irony effect in the classically stereotypical condition reflects the fact that a highly predictable belief constitutes a strong contextual constraint, which facilitates the integration of ironic meanings without incurring additional processing costs. Individual difference analyses further revealed that only the Empathic Concern (EC) subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) modulated irony processing. Specifically, in the spillover region, higher IRI-EC was associated with facilitated processing of ironic utterances under both the classically stereotypical and neutral belief conditions. In Experiment 2, processing costs were confined to the neutral belief condition and appeared only in the spillover region, not in the target region. Individual difference analyses further revealed that only implicit gender attitudes moderated reading times in this condition. Specifically, under neutral contexts, readers with stronger implicit gender stereotypes exhibited more cautious processing of literal utterances, as reflected in prolonged reading times in the spillover region. Three main conclusions emerge: (1) Stable social beliefs act as a cognitive constraint—strong social expectations facilitate irony processing, whereas weak expectations induce processing costs, consistent with a constraint-based parallel processing account. (2) Task demands modulate the timing and sensitivity to social conflict: explicit tasks amplify and accelerate the cost of counter-stereotypical beliefs, while natural reading delays it. (3) Individual differences in implicit attitudes and social-cognitive abilities further moderate perspective-taking.

Key words: perspective-taking, irony, gender stereotypes, pragmatics, individual differences