Post by Victoria University of Wellington

A social scientist who’s interested in connecting the dots between language and the way our brains work, Dr Stephen Skalicky from the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, wants to understand how people create and interpret things like satire, irony, and humour. Dr Skalicky draws on language sciences, computation and psycholinguistics to understand how people make sense of complex meanings. The cognitive mechanisms that lie behind irony is the focus of Dr Skalicky’s research, as he believes that understanding irony is crucial for human communication. How do we know when someone is being ironic? Why do some people get irony and some people don’t? “Language is a lot more complex than prevailing linguistic theories might suggest. For hundreds of years, people have assumed that we’ve memorised language as a set of rules and patterns. But I think things like humour and irony have always challenged that,” he says. Read more about Dr Skalicky’s research below.