About
32
Publications
8,054
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330
Citations
Introduction
Current institution
Additional affiliations
August 2021 - present
Position
- PostDoc Position
Description
- I work as Academy of Finland funded postdoctoral researcher in my project "Irony comprehension across the lifespan"
April 2021 - July 2021
Education
June 2012 - March 2019
May 2010 - January 2012
September 2006 - May 2010
Publications
Publications (32)
The present study examined individual differences in the processing of different forms of figurative language. Sixty participants read sarcastic, metaphorical, and literal sentences embedded in story contexts while their eye movements were recorded, and responded to a text memory and an inference question after each story. Individual differences in...
Theoretical models of irony comprehension pose different hypotheses about the time course of resolving ironic interpretation of an utterance, and they propose several context-, phrase-, and reader-related factors that influence the ease or difficulty of processing irony. In recent years, these factors have been examined using eye tracking, which al...
Very little is known about the processes underlying second language (L2) speakers’ understanding of written metaphors and similes. Moreover, most of the theories on figurative language comprehension do not consider reader-related factors. In the study, we used eye-tracking to examine how native Finnish speakers (N = 63) read written English nominal...
Some patients with a visual field loss due to a lesion in the primary visual cortex (V1) can shift their gaze to stimuli presented in their blind visual field. The extent to which a similar "blindsight" capacity is present in neurologically healthy individuals remains unknown. Using retinotopically navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)...
Ironic language is challenging for many people to understand, and particularly for children. Comprehending irony is considered a major milestone in children's development, as it requires inferring the intentions of the person who is being ironic. However, the theories of irony comprehension generally do not address developmental changes, and there...
In verbal irony there is a contrast between the literal meaning of what is stated and the intended meaning of the words. As successful comprehension of irony requires going beyond lexical meaning, the ability to understand it tends to develop late compared to literal language and it is challenging for children. Numerous explanations have been propo...
Irony comprehension requires going beyond literal meaning of words, and is challenging for children. In this pre-registered study we investigated how teaching metapragmatic knowledge in classrooms impacts written irony comprehension in 10-year-old Finnish-speaking children (n = 41, 21 girls) compared to a control group (n = 34, 13 girls). At pre-te...
Irony comprehension requires going beyond literal meaning of words and is challenging for children. In this pre-registered study, we investigated how teaching metapragmatic knowledge in classrooms impacts written irony comprehension in 10-year-old Finnish-speaking children (n = 41, 21 girls) compared to a control group (n = 34, 13 girls). At pre-te...
Verbal irony is a common form of figurative language. However, it can be challenging for children to understand, as successful comprehension requires going beyond lexical meaning. Thus, it is not surprising that irony comperehension is also a relatively late-developing skill. Numerous explanations have been proposed for the late development, includ...
In verbal irony there is a contrast between the literal meaning of what is stated and the intended meaning of the words. As successful comprehension of irony requires going beyond lexical meaning, the ability to understand it tends to develop late compared to literal language and it is challenging for children. Numerous explanations have been propo...
Eye movement measures provide detailed information about the time-course of linguistic processing. However, many eye fixation measures typically reported in reading studies may reflect a mixture of underlying processes. For example, gaze durations, which are calculated as the sum of fixations made on a word during its first-pass reading, may contai...
The use and interpretation of figurative expressions (e.g., irony, idiom, and metaphor) is an integral part of everyday human communication. Thus, the ability to comprehend figurative language underpins successful communication and social functioning. Despite this, there is an ongoing debate regarding the fundamental cognitive and neural processes...
Previous research indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected dreaming negatively. We compared 1132 dreams collected with prospective two-week dream diary during the pandemic to
166 dreams collected before the pandemic. We hypothesized that the pandemic would increase the number of threatening events, threats related to diseases, and the seve...
Irony comprehension requires going beyond literal meaning of words, and is challenging for children. In this pre-registered study we investigated how teaching metapragmatic knowledge in classrooms impacts 10-year-olds’ written irony comprehension (n = 41, 21 girls) compared to a control group (n = 34, 13 girls). At pre-test, participants read ironi...
Liversedge, Drieghe, Li, Yan, Bai and Hyönä (2016) reported an eye movement study that investigated reading in Chinese, Finnish and English (languages with markedly different orthographic characteristics). Analyses of the eye movement records showed robust differences in fine grained characteristics of eye movements between languages, however, over...
Eyetracking studies have shown that readers reread ironic phrases when resolving their meaning. Moreover, it has been shown that the timecourse of processing ironic meaning is affected by reader's working memory capacity (WMC). Irony is a context-dependent phenomenon but using traditional eye-movement measures it is difficult to analyze processing...
Objective: In the wake of COVID-19, a second pandemic of domestic violence (DV) has been reported. Stay-at-home orders intended to protect citizens and mitigate the spread of the virus have left many DV victims trapped with their abusers. Research indicates an increase in the frequency and severity of violence against women during the pandemic. Add...
Episodic memories of emotionally salient and personally significant events are often incorporated into dreams, although rarely replayed identically to the original waking event except in replicative posttraumatic nightmares. We investigated, in five Swedish female 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami survivors, how episodic memories of the catastrophe were re...
Eye-tracking studies have shown that readers reread ironic phrases when resolving their meaning. Moreover, it has been shown that the time-course of processing ironic meaning is affected by readers working memory capacity (WMC). Irony is a context-dependent phenomena but using traditional eye-movement measures it is difficult to analyze processing...
Ironic language is challenging for many people to understand, and particularly for children. Comprehending irony is considered a major milestone in children’s development, as it requires inferring the intentions of the person who is being ironic. However, the theories of irony comprehension generally do not address developmental changes, and there...
In the wake of COVID-19 a second pandemic of domestic violence (DV) has been reported. Stay-at-home orders intended to protect citizens and mitigate the spread of the virus have left many DV victims trapped with their abusers. Research indicates an increase in the frequency and severity of violence against women during the pandemic. Additionally, a...
Blindsight patients have visual field loss due to a lesion in the primary visual cortex (V1). Some of them can shift their gaze to stimuli presented in their blind visual field, but the extent to which a similar unconscious capacity is present in neurologically healthy individuals remains unknown. Using retinotopically navigated transcranial magnet...
Based on the Social Simulation Theory of dreaming (SST), we studied the effects of voluntary social seclusion on dream content and sleep structure. Specifically, we studied the Compensation Hypothesis, which predicts social dream contents to increase during social seclusion, the Sociality Bias-a ratio between dream and wake interactions-and the Str...
Very little is known about the processes underlying second language (L2) speakers’ understanding of written metaphors and similes. Most of the theories on figurative language comprehension do not consider reader-related factors. In the study, we used eye-tracking to examine how native Finnish speakers (N = 63) read written English nominal metaphors...
Theoretical models of irony comprehension pose different hypotheses about the time-course of resolving ironic interpretation of an utterance, and propose several context-, phrase- and reader-related factors that influence the ease or difficulty of processing irony. In recent years, these factors have been examined using eye tracking, which allows a...
An eye-tracking experiment examined the recognition of novel and lexicalized compound words during sentence reading. The frequency of the head noun in modifier-head compound words was manipulated to tap into the degree of compositional processing. This was done separately for long (12–16 letter) and short (7-9 letters) compound words. Based on the...
Posttraumatic symptoms, including nightmares, are more prevalent in World War II survivors than in the general population, but how war experiences have affected subsequent dream content in specific survivor populations remains less explored. In the present study, we used self-reports collected in 1973 from Polish Auschwitz survivors (N = 150; 45 wo...
A core feature of sarcasm is that there is a discrepancy between the literal meaning of the utterance and the context in which it is presented. This means that a sarcastic statement embedded in a story introduces a break in local coherence. Previous studies have shown that sarcastic statements in written stories often elicit longer processing times...
Theoretical accounts of irony comprehension assume that when an ironic utterance is unfamiliar and the context does not prime for ironic interpretation, processing should take longer than when reading the same utterance with a literal meaning. This slowdown reflects problems in integrating the utterance into the developing text representation, whic...
Previous eye-tracking studies suggest that when resolving the meaning of sarcastic utterances in a text, readers often initiate fixations that return to the sarcastic utterance from subsequent parts of the text. We used a modified trailing mask paradigm to examine both the role of these look-back fixations in sarcasm comprehension and whether there...
Movement in Parkinson’s disease (PD) is fragmented, and the patients depend on visual information in their behavior. This suggests that the patients may have deficits in internally monitoring their own movements. Internal monitoring of movements is assumed to rely on corollary discharge signals that enable the brain to predict the sensory consequen...
We examined processing of written irony by recording readers' eye movements while they read target phrases embedded either in ironic or non-ironic story context. After reading each story, participants responded to a text memory question and an inference question tapping into the understanding of the meaning of the target phrase. The results of Expe...
