Young children are notoriously bad at understanding ironical statements, with irony comprehension emerging around the age of 6 and appearing resistant to task manipulation. What can explain this late emergence? We propose that children's epistemic vigilance is a pivotal component of the constellation of socio-cognitive abilities underpinning irony comprehension. Epistemic vigilance enables children to detect the contextual incongruity of an ironical statement, discern that the ironical speaker is neither mistaken nor deceptive, and infer the critical, dissociative attitude expressed through verbal irony. By highlighting the role of epistemic vigilance, this account provides insight into the developmental puzzle of irony comprehension. It elucidates why its developmental trajectory diverges from that of other forms of figurative or humorous language and why it is closely linked to lie understanding and second-order false belief reasoning.
Studies find that irony comprehension emerges around the ages of 6-7, aligning with second-order theory of mind (ToM) abilities. This study follows up on previous research suggesting that children younger than this age might be to some extent sensitive to irony uttered with a parodic tone of voice. Using picture selection and eye gaze measures, 4-7-year-old children were tested on a parodic irony comprehension task. We also investigated the proposed connection between second-order ToM abilities and parodic irony comprehension. Given that parodic irony has an affinity with pretense we also explored how pretend play skills influenced comprehension. Results corroborate existing evidence that children only reliably pass the irony task by age 6, and that second-order ToM abilities contribute to irony comprehension but only in 6-7-year-olds. Pretend play also positively correlates with comprehension scores, suggesting that this aspect of cognitive and social development might contribute positively to children's irony understanding.
Irony comprehension is a complex pragmatic skill developing late in childhood, with inconsistent findings regarding the acquisition age. One reason for this inconsistency could be that previous studies focused on different components of irony comprehension (e.g., speaker belief, emotion, meaning, intent), relied on metapragmatic questions, or used offline measures. Building on recent methods combining offline tasks with eye-tracking, we developed LEIRO, a tool for testing irony comprehension in children aged 3 and older. LEIRO presents vignette stories, requiring children to select objects based on target utterances, while eye-tracking and pupillometry measure implicit comprehension. A pilot study with German-speaking 7-year-olds (n = 15) and adults (n = 13), conducted primarily to test the method in practice, showed only limited irony comprehension in children compared to adults. LEIRO will be made available for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies to advance the research on, and thus our understanding of, the development of irony comprehension.
Understanding irony requires epistemic vigilance towards both the content and source of communication. We conducted two experiments to investigate whether children's early epistemic vigilance abilities aid in detecting verbal irony. The first experiment focused on children's vigilance towards utterance content, hypothesizing that utterances whose explicit (or literal) content is more inappropriate in the context would be easier to recognize as ironic. The second experiment examined children's vigilance towards the source of the utterances, hypothesizing that children would find ironic (but literally accurate) informants more trustworthy than inaccurate ones. Both tasks proved challenging for 3- to 7-year-olds, providing no direct evidence of irony understanding. While adults performed as predicted in the first experiment, they did not trust ironic (but accurate) informants, suggesting that the trustworthiness paradigm may not suit the complexity of verbal irony, where the speaker is both dismissive and correct. Our results contribute to a better understanding of the role of epistemic vigilance in irony development.
Several theories explain how adults understand verbal irony, but only a few have been generalized to explain children's comprehension of verbal irony. In this narrative review paper, we identify cues to verbal irony (Theme 1), related cognitive skills (Theme 2), and social experience (Theme 3) as three main themes in the existing developmental verbal irony literature. Next, we review papers where researchers have directly tested theories with children to determine which theories have been generalized to explain these themes. This allows us to identify which research domains have received a theoretical interpretation, and which ones should be theoretically examined in future research. Based on our summary, we suggest that the Parallel Constraint Satisfaction (PCS) framework provides a promising verbal irony theory, and we identify directions for future research for testing the PCS framework.
A distinctive feature of verbal irony is the expression of a dissociative attitude. Although attitude understanding represents a key element of irony comprehension and its development, the experimental research in this area remains fragmented and often yields mixed findings. This paper reviews the measures employed to target distinct aspects of irony understanding, including attitude recognition, and examines inconsistencies in their application. Furthermore, it explores how features of experimental stimuli - including contextual, verbal, and paraverbal cues - can affect children's performance. Our analysis lays the foundation for refining the conceptualisation of the dissociation expressed by the ironical attitude and overcoming methodological challenges such as ensuring consistency in the design of measures and their alignment with experimental stimuli. Adopting a more rigorous and integrative approach has the potential to illuminate the developmental trajectory of ironical attitude comprehension and support the establishment of more systematic and reliable research in this domain.
As a pragmatic competence, irony comprehension plays an important role in everyday communication and social relationships. Research to date has mainly focused on irony comprehension in typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder. More recently, pragmatic competences of children with ADHD have also received attention, although the focus has been more on global pragmatic competences. A few studies have examined irony comprehension in children with ADHD as a specific pragmatic sub-competence, but many questions remain unresolved. Therefore, the aim of this article is to map the state of research regarding irony comprehension in children with ADHD and, on this basis, to outline a research agenda for future studies investigating this important pragmatic sub-competence in children with ADHD.
Unlike other figurative language abilities, irony emerges rather late, and its mastering takes place over a protracted window of development. Whilst its late emergence reflects the later development of prerequisite skills, its protracted development is likely to reflect the fact that some ironies are easier to grasp than others. In this paper, we discuss how conventionality is one factor which is likely to contribute to how easily ironies are mastered, yet despite this the nature of conventionality in irony and its effects on irony development are mostly unexplored. We argue for the existence of multiple sources of conventionality for irony likely to play a crucial role in its development. Since some of these sources facilitate adult irony processing, we investigate whether conventionality is likely to be a help to achieve proficient irony comprehension or rather a hinderance, as it has been found to be elsewhere in pragmatic development.
Humans are endowed with a suite of cognitive mechanisms that enable them to mitigate the risk of misinformation and underlie their epistemic vigilance. When direct access to the initial source of information is unavailable, individuals often rely on the vigilance of others to acquire beliefs. Moreover, monitoring the critical alertness of one's interlocutors is essential for interpreting their communicative intentions, particularly in cases of deliberately conveying false information, such as lies or verbal irony. However, little is known about the human capacity to track others' epistemic vigilance and use this information to guide belief formation and pragmatic interpretation. This study investigates whether children aged from 4 to 8 selectively trust vigilant over gullible informants. Our findings suggest that selective trust based on informant vigilance towards inaccuracy begins to emerge around the age of 6.
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 proposed for the late development of irony comprehension, including emerging language and perspective-taking skills, working memory, and metapragmatic knowledge. Irony training studies have the potential to be an effective means of testing these explanations and moving beyond correlational designs. We review recent studies that tested this possibility. The results suggest that even short-term irony training can be effective for improving children’s irony comprehension accuracy, and that metapragmatic knowledge is a key mechanism of irony understanding. We outline directions for future training studies and link those to possibilities for both intervention and theory development.
In everyday communication, criticisms are important and commonly occurring face-threatening acts. In this paper, we investigate the way people deal with criticisms by conducting two experiments in French involving the production of, and response to, criticisms using a written Discourse Completion Test. In each experiment, we presented participants with scenarios in which we manipulated power relations (equal vs. hierarchical) and horizontal social distance (close or distant). We also assessed the roles of age and gender of the participants. Results indicate that power and distance significantly impact the formulation of criticisms but not that of responses to criticisms. Similarly, age and gender significantly interacted in the formulation of criticisms, with younger women being less direct, but older women being more direct compared to men. No effect was found on responses to criticisms. Taken together, these findings provide a more comprehensive perspective of the factors affecting the production of, and response to, criticisms from an experimental perspective, thus contributing to our understanding of this pivotal but understudied speech act.
In this paper, I consider contrastive discourse markers (CDMs) in English and Greek in terms of their etymological origins. In particular, I argue that English and Greek CDMs draw on sources inspired by the same basic cognitive categories: namely, PLACE, QUANTITY, and MANNER; and that these sources are designations of three apparently distinct concepts: namely, allness, sameness, and oppositeness. What makes this consensus even more interesting, not to say curious, is that Greek does not belong to the group of the Indo-European family that includes English. I will suggest that our world experience is the common denominator of the three designated concepts. It is hoped that this suggestion will be grounds not only for explaining the attested unanimity among English and Greek but also for illuminating the development of CDMs cross-linguistically.
In everyday communication, criticisms are important and commonly occurring face-threatening acts. In this paper, we investigate the way people deal with criticisms by conducting two experiments in French involving the production of, and response to, criticisms using a written Discourse Completion Test. In each experiment, we presented participants with scenarios in which we manipulated power relations (equal vs. hierarchical) and horizontal social distance (close or distant). We also assessed the roles of age and gender of the participants. Results indicate that power and distance significantly impact the formulation of criticisms but not that of responses to criticisms. Similarly, age and gender significantly interacted in the formulation of criticisms, with younger women being less direct, but older women being more direct compared to men. No effect was found on responses to criticisms. Taken together, these findings provide a more comprehensive perspective of the factors affecting the production of, and response to, criticisms from an experimental perspective, thus contributing to our understanding of this pivotal but understudied speech act.
Despite the numerous studies on the perception of speech acts, very little is known about how children in middle childhood perceive implicit speech acts (ISA) across different ages. To this end, referring to the research paradigm described by Holtgraves ( 2005 , 2008 ), this study aimed to examine the identification and classification of utterances with implicit performatives among 621 Chinese children between the age of 9–13. The results indicate that on the identification task, 11- and 12-year-olds significantly outperformed 9-year-olds, and girls identify more implicit speech acts than boys. Most importantly, similar to adults, 13-year-olds categorized implicit speech acts based on the emotional valence of listeners, while 11-year-olds tended to group them according to the psychological states and attitudes of the speakers. However, 9-year-olds were not able to classify implicit speech acts. The above findings offer valuable implications for pragmatic teaching and research.
When engaging imaginatively with a work of literary fiction, readers do more than reconstruct what is fictionally true - they also engage in richer forms of imagining. While the reconstruction of fictional truth must comply, at least to some extent, with the author's intention, experiential imagining is often considered too subjective to be normatively constrained. This paper challenges this assumption by arguing that, although experiential imagining is largely subjective, it can be intentionally directed. In culturally, historically, or morally charged contexts, readers should aim to imaginatively experience what the author seeks to communicate.
This study analyzes the linguistic strategies in a guided meditation exercise. It describes the cognitive and phenomenal processes that the language encourages in meditators and how these relate to the philosophies that inform the Waking Up mindfulness app. It takes a discourse analytic approach grounded in Cognitive linguistics, applying concepts like conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), deliberate metaphor (Steen 2014, 2017), force-dynamics (Talmy 2000) and subjective/objective construal (Langacker 2008). The study finds that the cognitive semantics of the language encourages meditators to (a) adopt metaphorical frames and simulate physio-spatial scenarios in which introspective phenomena can be easily observed and manipulated; (b) strategically relinquish cognitive effort in ways that diminish their sense of agency; and (c) construe their sense of Self in paradoxical ways that may make it difficult to detect. The findings contribute to understanding how language can influence introspective phenomenal processes, providing insights for meditation guides and discourse analysts.
Communicative intentions, conceived as internal mental states, are subject to an objection already raised by Wittgenstein: since they are not accessible to hearers, they cannot play an explanatory role in utterance understanding. Such an objection has led Sbisà ( 2001 / 2023a ) and Hansen & Terkourafi (2023) to propose shifting the weight of explanation from speaker’s to hearer’s meaning. This article delineates the scope of that objection, arguing that communicative intentions are irrelevant if conceived as private mental states, but defending an alternative, public conception of communicatively relevant mental states, framed in terms of representations of public correlations between public facts. This allows for the formation of rules which are intersubjective but nonetheless mental. Importantly, such rules are presupposed by intentional communication as described in animal studies. Given this public conception of the mental, neither the speaker nor the hearer holds special authority over the intended content: they share a narrowly constrained authority.
A frequent response to someone taking offence in response to conversational humour is to claim the utterances in question were 'not serious', 'taken out of context', or that any offence taken was 'unintended'. Yet in some instances such claims are construed as inadequate or irrelevant. In this paper we consider why that is the case. Building on a detailed analysis of incidents in which ostensibly joking utterances are construed as offensive, we propose that offence is a fundamentally scalar phenomenon: not simply in the sense of the joking in question being open to evaluation as more or less offensive, but with respect to the morally ordered scope of that offence. The degree to which perceived offences become impervious to claims that any offence caused or taken was 'unintended' is a function of the scope of the spatiotemporal scales invoked through the joking itself and subsequent responses to it.
A lie commits the speaker to the truth of an assertion they believe false. But a speaker uttering a falsehood in jest or sarcasm arguably neither asserts that falsehood nor lies. The insincere speaker essentially "uncommits" to the truth of their remark. Social media posters, criminal defendants, and politicians facing pushback regularly appeal to the sarcasm defense as a get-out-of-accountability-free card, often supporting this move by citing a purported insincerity marker accompanying the critical utterance. But proffered plausible deniability may be implausible, resulting in legal or public disputes. How credible is the sarcasm or "only joking" defense, particularly when retroactively invoked? In Grice's terms, how do we distinguish what a speaker says from what a speaker makes as if to say? This study surveys modes of "uncommitment" and the interactional and grammatical properties of devices associated with signals of insincerity that have been employed from twenty-two centuries ago to today.
The ongoing and divisive discourse regarding the use of offensive humour in stand-up comedy is taking place both off-stage and on-stage: comedians use jokes that target sensitive characteristics ostensibly to show that no topic is 'off limits', while also taking a stance against those who argue for more empathetic comedy that does not reinforce stereotypes and discriminatory beliefs. Taking Jimmy Carr's 'holocaust joke' (2021) as a case study, we examine the entire life-cycle of jokes from their live-performance context to entering the public sphere, questioning what a joker can be held accountable for in stand-up comedy. Specifically, we look at the performance frame, comedian personality and persona, and how different types of audience may react to a joke, in order to shed light on what exactly it is that the producer of an offensive joke can, or should, be held accountable for.
