Children's Comprehension of Critical and Complimentary Forms of Verbal Irony

How do typically developing children grasp the meaning of verbal irony?

“…At a linguistic level, ironic criticisms and ironic compliments are not different in any principled way; both involve making a remark using the opposite valence to that which is intended (Nakassis & Snedeker, 2002). Certainly, children tend to find speaker belief judgments easier for ironic criticisms than for ironic compliments in cases where an explicit echo is not provided for ironic statements (de Groot et al, 1995;Hancock et al, 2000;Harris & Pexman, 2003) and we would predict the same tendency for speaker belief judgments in the present study. Ironic compliments are less conventional than ironic criticisms (Gibbs, 2000), so children will likely have less experience with ironic compliments than with ironic criticisms.…”

“…There is evidence that children attend to some of the same conditions for irony as do adults. For instance, children's irony comprehension is facilitated by echoic mention (Hancock et al, 2000;Keenan & Quigley, 1999). We would argue that a developmental explanation of irony comprehension requires more than a restatement of adult theories.…”

“…Ackerman posited that inference was problematic because children often lacked the knowledge required to use irony as the inferential solution. Hancock et al (2000) tested Ackerman's (1983) claims about a two stage process for early irony comprehension. Five-and six-year-old children were presented with short videotaped scenarios that ended with ironic criticisms (e.g., ''you are a really good basketball player''), literal criticisms (e.g., ''you are a really bad basketball player''), ironic compliments (again, a bad basketball player) and literal compliments (again, a good basketball player).…”

Development of comprehension of ironic utterances in 3- to 9-year-old Finnish-speaking children

“…Most of the earlier studies concerning development of comprehension of ironic utter- ances have been done with English-speaking children (Dews et al, 1996;Hancock et al, 2000;Pexman & Glenwright, 2007;Pexman et al, 2005Pexman et al, , 2006 so this study provides information about the development of comprehension of irony in children speaking a different language and of a different cultural background.…”

“…Children understand ironic criticism more easily than ironic compliments (Hancock, Dunham, & Purdy, 2000;Pexman & Glenwright, 2007). In everyday language use people tend to use ironic criticism more often than ironic compliments and thus expectations affect the understanding of statements.…”