Validation of Hindi and English ironic sentences for bilingual comprehension research.

Irony is a complex communicative device that contrasts the explicit, literal meaning with the implicit intent and is sensitive to cultural and linguistic context. Despite growing interest in bilingual irony comprehension, experimentally validated materials for non-Western bilinguals remain scarce. This study addresses this methodological gap by adapting and validating a bilingual set of ironic and literal stimuli in Hindi and English, suitable for investigating psycholinguistic processing in Hindi-English bilingual adults. Drawing on established English-language irony sets, the stimuli were structurally adapted and culturally localised, then translated and back-translated by native speakers. A rigorous validation procedure involving 60 Hindi-English bilinguals assessed familiarity, comprehension, clarity, ironic intent, and translation quality for each text using a five-point Likert scale. Statistical analyses revealed high familiarity, clarity, and comprehensibility across both languages, with ironic stimuli consistently rated as highly perceived for irony and literal stimuli rated as low. The final materials comprise 50 irony-literal sentence pairs and 10 fillers, offering a tightly controlled stimulus set for future controlled cross-linguistic investigation. This research provides a methodological foundation for investigating figurative language processing in bilinguals and advances understanding of pragmatic competence across diverse sociolinguistic contexts.