Influence of Voice Intonation on Understanding Irony by Polish-Speaking Preschool Children

Abstract

GTh e main aim of the presented study was to investigate the infl uence of voice intonation on the comprehension of ironic utt erances in 4-to 6-year-old Polish-speaking children. 83 preschool children were tested with the Irony Comprehension Task (Banasik & Bokus, 2012). In the Irony Comprehension Task, children are presented with stories in which ironic utt erances were prerecorded and read by professional speakers using an ironic intonation. Half of the subjects performed the regular Irony Comprehension Task while the other half were given a modifi ed version of the Irony Comprehension Task (ironic content was utt ered using a non-ironic intonation). Results indicate that children from the ironic intonation group scored higher on the Irony Comprehension Task than children who heard ironic statements utt ered using a neutral voice. Ironic voice intonation appeared to be a helpful cue to irony comprehension.

Socio-cultural and individual factors in verbal irony use and understanding: What we know, what we don’t know, what we want to know

“…For example, bilingualism has been linked to greater theory of mind (ToM) development (Goetz, 2003;Kovács www.rcommunicationr.org cate ironic intent. In turn, this point was also discussed by Sperber and Wilson (1981) and Clark and Gerrig (1984) as an important cue for irony (see also Pexman, 2008;Zajączkowska, 2017). Slower tempo, lower pitch, and high intensity of speech have been identified as the chief prosodic cues of irony (Cheang & Pell, 2008;Mauchand et al, 2018;Mauchand et al, 2020;Woodland & Voyer, 2011).…”

Children's Exposure to Irony in the First Four Years of Their Life: What We Learn About the Use of Ironic Comments by Mothers from the Analysis of the Providence Corpus of Childes

“…Burgers, van Mulken, and Schellens (2012), on the basis of extensive literature review, have enumerated the following markers of irony: metaphor, hyperbole, understatement, rhetorical question (tropes as irony markers), ironic repetition, ironic echo, change of register (schematic irony markers), exclamation, taq question, focus optimalization, interjections, diminutives (morpho-syntactic irony markers), and typographic irony markers which will not be discussed in the paper since they refer to written text and the focus of this analysis paper is spoken interaction. The researchers did not include phonological cues of irony, such as intonation, nasalization, exaggerated stress, slowed rate of speaking, syllable lengthening, laughter, or flat intonation (Attardo, 2000), and although these are also considered important cues for recognizing irony (Zajączkowska, 2016), they will not be included in the analysis as they are beyond the scope of this paper.…”