Abstract
In the present study we addressed two novel questions: (1) is children's irony appreciation and processing related to their empathy skills? and (2) is children's processing of a speaker's ironic meaning best explained by a modular or interactive theory? Participants were thirty-one 8- and 9-year-olds children. We used a variant of the visual world paradigm to assess children's processing of ironic and literal evaluative remarks; in this paradigm children's cognition is revealed through their actions and eye gaze. Results in this paradigm showed that children's irony appreciation and processing were correlated with their empathy development, suggesting that empathy or emotional perspective taking may be important for development of irony comprehension. Further, children's processing of irony was consistent with an interactive framework, in which children consider ironic meanings in the earliest moments, as speech unfolds. These results provide important new insights about development of this complex aspect of emotion recognition.
Highlights
One of the challenges children face in developing emotion recognition is created by the fact that people often convey emotions indirectly, for example, through use of verbal irony
A paired samples t-test was conducted on the accuracy scores for the remaining two statement types, ironic criticisms and literal criticisms, and this showed that children were significantly less accurate in their speaker intent actions for ironic criticisms (M = 0.48, SD = 0.47) than for literal criticisms (M = 0.94, SD = 0.18), t(30) = 4.55, p < 0.001
Children did not show any tendency to look to the literal response object first as they judged speaker intent for ironic statements, we examined their looking behavior across the whole response to test whether there was evidence for a literal bias for ironic statements in later looking behavior
Summary
One of the challenges children face in developing emotion recognition is created by the fact that people often convey emotions indirectly, for example, through use of verbal irony. Comprehension of irony requires the listener to use cues like tone of voice in order to infer the attitude and emotions of the speaker. This type of emotional perspective taking can be challenging for children and research suggests that irony appreciation develops over a long developmental window in middle childhood (Pexman and Glenwright, 2007). While there is as yet no developmental theory of irony appreciation, there is growing interest in the issue of how children reason about these statements
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
