Sarcasm between siblings: Children's use of relationship information in processing ironic remarks

Abstract

We investigated whether children's appreciation of verbal irony is facilitated by the provision of speaker–addressee relationship information, namely that of a sibling relationship. We assessed both the product and process of children's interpretations to test whether children's processing of ironic remarks is better explained by sequential or interactive accounts of irony processing. Children (aged 5–8 years) viewed puppet shows in which the speaker and addressee were described either as siblings or as new acquaintances and the speaker made either an ironic or a literal remark. Using a variant of the visual world paradigm, participants were trained to make a motor response, selecting a response object to indicate whether they thought the speaker had a literal or an ironic intention. The timing of children's motor responses and their eye gaze to the response objects were tracked and analyzed. Results showed that sibling relationship information did not impact the accuracy of children's speaker intent judgments, but facilitated children's responding in the earliest stages of processing. We argue that these results are consistent with an interactive processing account of irony, by which cues to speaker intent are integrated early in the comprehension process.