Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigates how adolescents process written irony and how individual differences in vocabulary and mentalizing abilities relate to comprehension. While prior research has focused on adults, less is known about how developing readers integrate linguistic and contextual information to derive non-literal meaning. One hundred eighteen Spanish-speaking adolescents (16–18 years) read short texts containing ironic or literal utterances while their eye movements were recorded. Comprehension accuracy and reading-time measures were analyzed using mixed-effects models. Ironic utterances elicited longer regression-path durations and total reading times than literal statements, indicating increased integration and reanalysis demands. Accuracy was lower for ironic texts and positively associated with vocabulary knowledge, although this effect did not differ by condition. Mentalizing abilities did not significantly predict performance. These findings suggest that written irony comprehension in adolescence involves increased processing demands and is associated with linguistic proficiency, while evidence for mentalizing abilities in this task remains limited.