Student Presenter(s): Jack Rosner, Emily Novick, Jon Harewood, Caitlin Mahland
Faculty Mentor: Nicole Calma-Roddin
Department: Behavioral Sciences
School/College: College of Arts and Sciences, Long Island

Irony is a nonliteral language that identifies a discrepancy between expectations and reality. Having context related to a speaker's personality or mood will affect how often people expect the speaker to be ironic. Students at NYIT will be the participants in this study. Participants will hear a recording of an auditory dialogue. The experimenters will give the participants some information about one of the speakers in the dialogue, such as that the speaker is funny. Eventually, the dialogue will reach a line that is presented in text with an unidentified speaker. Student participants will report which speaker they believe said this line. Specifically, choosing one speaker will make the sentence ironic, while the other speaker would say the line sincerely. This means that which speaker the participant chooses will reveal whether or not they interpreted the line of text as ironic or not. The conclusions lay in whether or not the context affects participants' perceptions of the text.