The results are discussed and integrated into a larger conceptual framework that includes research on lexical bias and sarcasm.

Previous research has suggested that children do not rely on prosody to infer a speaker's emotional state because of biases toward lexical content or situational context. We hypothesized that there are actually no such biases and that young children simply have trouble in using emotional prosody. Sixty children from 5 to 13 years of age had to judge the emotional state of a happy or sad speaker and then to verbally explain their judgment. Lexical content and situational context were devoid of emotional valence. Results showed that prosody alone did not enable the children to infer emotions at age 5, and was still not fully mastered at age 13. Instead, they relied on contextual information despite the fact that this cue had no emotional valence. These results support the hypothesis that prosody is difficult to interpret for young children and that this cue plays only a subordinate role up until adolescence to infer others’ emotions.

The literature suggests that irony production expands in the developmental period of adolescence. We aimed to test this hypothesis by investigating two channels: face-to-face and computer-mediated communication (CMC). Corpora were collected by asking seventh and 11th graders to freely discuss some general topics (e.g., music), either face-to-face or on online forums. Results showed that 6.2% of the 11th graders’ productions were ironic utterances, compared with just 2.5% of the seventh graders’ productions, confirming the major development of irony production in adolescence. Results also showed that adolescents produced more ironic utterances in CMC than face-to-face. The analysis suggested that irony use is a strategy for increasing in-group solidarity and compensating for the distance intrinsic to CMC, as it was mostly inclusive and well-marked on forums. The present study also confirmed previous studies showing that irony is compatible with CMC.

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