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11 - Irony and Thought: Developmental Insights

from Part IV - Irony in Linguistic Communication

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2023

By
Penny M. Pexman
Edited by
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr  and
Herbert L. Colston
Herbert L. Colston
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Summary

This chapter describes how children learn to produce and understand irony. Children do not usually understand irony very well until age 6 or so, a developmental process that continues to unfold throughout childhood. Pexman explores how children’s developing cognitive and linguistic skills (e.g., theory of mind abilities, specific language skills, executive functions related to metarepresentaitonal reasoning, emotion recognition, and epistemic vigilance) are critical to their becoming competent in understanding irony. Research on adults’ irony understanding suggests that part of children’s irony abilities may be explained via the parallel-constraint-satisfaction (PCS) theory that demonstrates how language, quite generally, is comprehended via the online integration of multiple discourse and sociocultural cues. Pexman discusses new findings from studies that may offer greater precision in detailing exactly how both children and adults detect and combine various cues in a predictive manner to quickly infer the complexities of ironic messages. She also sketches out several concrete directions for future experimental studies to better understand when and how children understand irony.

Keywords

childrencognitive skillsdevelopmentaltheory of mindmetarepresentaitonal reasoningparallel-constraint-satisfactionverbal irony
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought , pp. 181 - 196
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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