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.
