The development of joke and irony understanding: a study with 3- to 6-year-old children.

Previous research suggests that comprehending ironic utterances is a relatively late-developing skill, emerging around 5-6 years of age. This study investigated whether younger children might show an earlier understanding when ironic utterances are performed in familiar communicative situations, and investigated the relationships among irony comprehension, language, and theory of mind (ToM) abilities. A group of 100 children aged 3.0-6.5 years was presented with 4 types of puppet scenarios depicting different communicative interactions: control, joke, contingent irony and background irony stories. Results suggested that (a) even younger children easily understand jokes, and may sometimes understand ironies; (b) children's comprehension of irony continues to develop across early childhood; and (c) receptive vocabulary scores had simultaneous effects on irony comprehension and ToM performance.Keywords: verbal irony, theory of mind, communication, developmental pragmaticsSupplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cep000001 l.suppVerbal irony is a form of nonliteral communication and many different definitions have been provided in the literature (Attardo, 2000; Clark & Gerrig, 1984; Kreuz & Glucksberg, 1989; KumonNakamura, Glucksberg, & Brown, 1995; Wilson & Sperber, 1992). Developmental research has shown that the comprehension of ironic utterances is a particularly complex task for children (Capelli, Nakagawa, & Madden, 1990; Filippova & Astington, 2008; Winner, 1988). A number of studies have focused on the different aspects connected with the development of children's understanding of this communicative act (for a review see Creusere, 2000; Pexman & Glenwright, 2007). In particular, irony comprehension has been compared with deceit and metaphor. Some studies have investigated children's difficulties in understanding intentional falsehood, which is typical of deceit, politeness, and irony (Ackerman, 1981; Airenti & Angeleri, 2011; Peterson, Peterson, & Seeto, 1983). It has been shown that children as old as 13 years of age often fail to distinguish irony from deception (Demorest, Meyer, Phelps, Gardner, & Winner, 1984; Demorest, Silberstein, Gardner, & Winner, 1983). Data from other studies indicate much earlier competence (e.g., Andrews, Rosenblatt, Malkus, Gardner, & Winner, 1986), and the conelusion of most studies is that children's comprehension of irony starts between the age of 5 and 6 years (e.g., Dews & Winner, 1997) and continues developing over time.The particular difficulty in interpreting ironic utterances has often been attributed to the complexity of the inferences involved in comprehension, which are assumed to require a full-fledged theory of mind (ToM). Several studies have shown that children's inability to grasp the meaning of ironic phrases may be connected with their difficulties in inferring the speaker's beliefs and intentions (Sullivan, Winner, & Hopfteld, 1995; Winner, Brownell, Happe, Blum, & Pincus, 1998; Winner & Leekam, 1991). According to Winner (1988), in order to understand irony, the child has to be able to detect incongruity or falsehood, infer motivation, and attribute second-order beliefs to the speaker. Ackerman (1983) suggested that in children's comprehension of irony two independent processes can be distinguished, that is, the detection of the nonliteral form cued by contextual discrepancy and the process of inferring the speaker's intent cued by intonation. Hancock, Dunham, and Purdy (2000) confirmed this dissociation and attributed it to the fact that detection demands first-order reasoning about the speaker's beliefs while inferring the speaker's intent requires inferences on the speaker's beliefs about the listener's beliefs, that is, second-order reasoning.The same developmental sequence has been confirmed by Filippova and Astington (2008) in a study comparing children and adults. …