Abstract
Irony is one of the linguistic means in which intended and expressed meaning diverge. It serves social-communicative functions, requires the understanding of the speaker's mental state and its comprehension takes place at an advanced stage of language acquisition. In the present study, we investigated 8-year old’s irony comprehension and social skills and asked their parents about their preferred use of irony towards their children. We then compared children with the highest scores in irony comprehension test with those with lower scores. The full sample included 46 families from Poland. Results show positive associations between children’s levels of irony comprehension and levels of mothers irony use. No such relations were found for fathers. No differences were found in ToM scores between proficient and non-proficient irony comprehenders. Our findings provide a base for future studies to study the use of irony in child-parent talk in more diverse culturally and linguistically diverse populations.
Highlights
Irony is described as a situation when a speaker says X while meaning non-X [1,2,3,4], for instance, saying: “Great! This is just wonderful” in a situation when something goes wrong, uttered to express disappointment with what is happening
Questionnaires and tasks used with children We present instruments in the same order that they were administered to children: 1.1 To measure higher order Theory of Mind in children [46] and social skills, we administered the Social Ambiguous Stories Task (SAS) [47]
Due to the small range of the scores obtained by children in the Irony Comprehension Task, the score from this measure was changed into binary score
Summary
Irony is described as a situation when a speaker says X while meaning non-X [1,2,3,4], for instance, saying: “Great! This is just wonderful” in a situation when something goes wrong, uttered to express disappointment with what is happening. It has been shown that 6-year-olds understand the discrepancy between the surface and the intended meaning in a spoken ironic utterance [9,10,11,12,13,14], as well as the intentions of the speaker [15]. They can detect some pragmatic functions of irony [e.g.8, 12, 14 16] Some studies reported frequent failures with children as late as when they are 13 [17,18]. The understanding of irony requires a correct identification of the speaker’s intention and the understanding of the attitude towards the situation or person the comment refers to [23]
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