This article details a study of metaphor production by 64 same-gender dyads engaged in 2 persuasive conversations over chat software. Dyads were comprised of friends or strangers. Overall, men produced more metaphor than women, especially slang. Metaphor production differed by gender as a function of friendship status: Men produced the same amount…

Four experiments were conducted to assess the roles of politeness and humor in the asymmetry of affect observed in verbal irony production. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated different replies (ironic, literal, or "no response") made to hypothetical scenarios for their politeness and humor, respectively. Participants in Experiment 3 were…

Two questionnaire experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of 2 styles (hyperbole and orthographically deviant writing style) on the perception of hiniku, 'quasi-irony', and oseji, 'quasi-flattery', in the Japanese language. In each experiment, stories were constructed in which a speaker made a remark evaluating the addressee's…

Around 5 or 6 years of age, children begin to recognize that speakers who make ironic remarks do not believe what they literally say, but children of the same age do not show appreciation for the humor function of irony (Dews et al., 1996; Harris & Pexman, 2003). We investigated 7- to 10-year-old children's interpretations of verbal irony and…