Beyond Sarcasm: Intonation and Context as Relational Cues in Children's Recognition of Irony

1. Irony in Context: Developmentally and Theoretically For more than twenty years researchers have been trying to determine when children begin to understand irony. But we still don't have a clear answer. While some argue that irony comprehension emerges in early adolescence, Some of this confusion appears to be attributable to differences in the materials and procedures used (Creusere, 1999). Irony is a gradient phenomenon, ranging from subtle to crass, depending in part on the strength of the contextual cues available to infer the speaker's intent. Older children can apparently detect more subtle forms of irony and can succeed in tasks with substantial memory components. While younger children perform worse than adults, it is clear that they are not categorically incapable of understanding all aspects of irony. Their imperfect performance is often thought of as a bias to interpret statements literally (Demorest et al. This results in a tendency to interpret a blatantly false statement as a lie or an error (Demorest et al., 1984; Sullivan et al., 1995). The child's increasing ability to interpret irony has been attributed both to concomitant changes in the child's theory of mind (Sullivan et al. But differences in cue strength and task difficulty alone cannot account for lack of consensus on when children begin to understand irony. A crucial reason for this disagreement is that the question itself is ambiguous. Some experimenters are interested in the child's ability to determine the speaker's attitude. Typically, this is operationally defined as the ability to label utterances as " nice " or " mean ". Other researchers ask their subjects to determine the speaker's intended meaning. This ability, the comprehension or construal of ironic statements, begins to appear around age 6 (see e.g., Keenan & Quigley, 1999). The studies that find the latest emergence of irony use tasks involving second-order belief judgments and the ability to distinguish ironic remarks from deception and ignorance. These skills are involved in what we will call the