他人期望类型对6~10岁儿童不同类型反语认知的影响

以态度、话语含义和语言现象探测为指标,探讨他人期望类型对6~10岁儿童不同类型反语认知的影响。结果表明：⑴他人期望类型（内隐和外显）影响儿童对他人态度和话语含义的探测,但不影响语言现象探测;⑵儿童在反语认知不同方面表现出发展的不平衡性。6岁儿童已具备初步的反语认知能力,开始能够理解反语中说话者的态度和话语含义,但还不能正确解释反语现象。直至10岁,儿童对反语现象的解释能力仍在发展中。⑶儿童对不同类型反语认知水平不同。6岁儿童对两类反语的解释不存在显著差异,8岁和10岁儿童对两类反语解释均存在显著差异。与反语恭维比,8岁和10岁儿童能更好地解释反语批评。     

6～10岁儿童反语理解的发展趋势及错误类型分析

通过考察儿童反语理解的发展趋势及错误类型发现:(1)6岁儿童已能初步理解反语讲话者的态度和话语含义,但直至10岁儿童对反语现象的解释能力仍在发展中。(2)6～10岁儿童主要的错误类型是把反语解释为"真诚话语",理解水平越低,该倾向越明显;理解水平越高,则越倾向于把反语解释为"谎话(或欺骗)"。     

6～10岁儿童对反语社会功能的认知

通过2个实验考察了6～10岁儿童对反语社会功能的认知。结果表明,通过反语讲话者信念任务的儿童,6岁已能识别反语的润色功能,8岁开始能识别反语恭维的幽默功能,直至10岁,儿童对反语批评幽默功能的识别仍在发展中。     

儿童反语理解的心理机制

反语是指使用与本意相反的字面形式表达本意的一种修辞形式,在儿童言语发展领域中是一种难度较大的认知对象。该对儿童在反语理解任务中的困难根源进行了探讨,介绍了目前关于儿童反语理解的心理机制研究的两种主要途径,一是采用成人反语识别理论去解释儿童反语理解的心理过程,二是从二阶心理理论角度开展的解释儿童反语理解的心理机制的尝试,最后在暗示假装理论和二阶心理理论的框架下对现有的研究证据进行了整合的讨论,并对未来研究提出了建议。     

反语认知的神经一心理机制研究及其进展

反语是指使用与本意相反的语句表达本意的修辞形式。从脑损伤者和神经发展异常者（包括精神分裂症和孤独症患者）角度,介绍了反语认知神经心理机制的研究,评述了现有研究并指出未来研究的方向。     

6~10岁儿童对损人情境下行为者的道德情绪判断与归因

采用故事情境法探讨6~10岁儿童对损人情境下损人者和旁观者的道德情绪判断与归因的发展。结果发现：（1）在损人情境下,6岁儿童能理解损人行为是不对的,但直到8岁儿童才能理解旁观行为是不对的;（2）随着年龄增长,儿童判断损人者的愉悦程度逐渐降低,情绪归因从结果定向过渡到道德定向;儿童判断旁观者的愉悦程度逐渐降低,情绪归因从无法有效归因过渡到道德定向;（3）儿童对不同行为者的道德情绪判断同时受年龄和性别的影响,6岁男孩判断损人者愉悦程度显著高于女孩,6岁男孩判断旁观者愉悦程度显著低于女孩;8岁和10岁儿童对两类行为者的道德情绪判断未发现显著的性别差异。     

5～8岁儿童对模糊信息具有多重解释的理解

参照Carpendale和Chandler的实验范式,研究儿童对于“人们可能对同样信息给出不同解释”这一现象的理解,考察5~8岁儿童的解释性心理理论的发展。结果表明,5岁儿童不能理解心理过程的解释性,认为同样的信息只有一种合理的解释。从6岁开始,儿童才认识到,模糊信息可以有多种解释,但6、7岁时的这种理解并不完善,成绩随着任务要求而变化。8岁儿童才有比较稳定的解释性心理理论。     

3．5－6．5岁儿童式样认知发展的实验研究

通过实验法,探讨了3．5－6．5岁儿童式样认知的发生和发展过程。结果表明：（1）：3．5－4．5岁和5．5－6．5岁是儿童的式样认知发展的两个快速发展期。（2）儿童式样认知发展的特点,3．5岁儿童处于式样认知发展的萌芽状态;4．5岁儿童（4．5岁）式样认知开始发展;5．5岁儿童式样认知比4．5岁有所发展,但仍处于开始发展阶段;6．5岁大部分儿童已基本上或完全有了式样概念。（3）儿童对各类式样的认知有一个由易到难的顺序：是从循环式样→重复式样→滋长式样→变异式样。（4）儿童式样认知发展是儿童认知发展的一个方面,可用中心概念结构理论来解释。     

语境影响反语理解的眼动研究元分析

运用元分析的方法考察语境在反语理解中的作用及其相关的调节因素。通过文献检索,共搜集了13篇有效文献,16项实验数据,包含了806名被试。结果发现：(1)在反语理解正确率指标上反语明显比字面语更难理解,语境与目标反语不一致会产生额外推理过程,导致反语理解相对困难。(2)目标区反语和字面语在第一遍阅读时间指标上没有差异,但是在回视路径阅读时间和总阅读时间指标上反语的加工时间显著更长,这表明语境在反语加工的后期产生了作用,读者需要在加工后期对反语进行重新分析和整合,这一结果基本符合模块化理论的预测。(3)熟悉性对目标区的第一遍阅读时间和总阅读时间产生了调节作用,表明不管语境强度如何,熟悉的意义首先被加工,这一结果与分级显著性假设的预测基本一致。     

文本解读中的限制与自由——论赫施对方法论诠释学的重构

美国诠释学家、文艺理论批评家赫施是伽达默尔的哲学诠释学重要的批评者之一。与伽达默尔把理解和解释的正确性闲置一旁,专注于阐明理解和解释如何发生的本体论诠释学取向的不同,赫施力图捍卫理解和解释的客观性立场,主张理解和解释是有限制的,其目标在于揭示和阐述文本的含义（以语言符号表达的作者意图）,但他同时主张一种自由的批评,以沟通文本含义与其他事物之间的联系,并彰显文本的意义。在赫施对方法论诠释学的重构中,我们可以看到一种试图超越诠释学中的客观主义和主观主义、作者中心论和读者中心论二元对立的努力。     

What Are You Really Saying? Associations between Shyness and Verbal Irony Comprehension

Verbal irony exploits the ambiguity inherent in language by using the discrepancy between a speaker's intended meaning and the literal meaning of his or her words to achieve social goals. Irony provides a window into children's developing pragmatic competence. Yet, little research exists on individual differences that may disrupt this understanding. For example, verbal irony may challenge shy children, who tend to interpret ambiguous stimuli as being threatening and who have difficulty mentalizing in social contexts. We examined whether shyness is related to the interpretation of ironic statements. Ninety‐nine children (8–12 year olds) listened to stories wherein one character made either a literal or ironic criticism or a literal or ironic compliment. Children appraised the speaker's belief and communicative intention. Shyness was assessed using self‐report measures of social anxiety symptoms and shy negative affect. Shyness was not related to children's comprehension of the counterfactual nature of ironic statements. However, shyness was related to children's ratings of speaker meanness for ironic statements. Thus, although not related to the understanding that speakers intended to communicate their true beliefs, shyness was related to children's construal of the social meaning of irony. Such subtle differences in language interpretation may underlie some of the social difficulties facing shy children. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

It's Fascinating Research: The Cognition of Verbal Irony

ABSTRACT— Verbal irony is nonliteral language that makes salient a discrepancy between expectations and reality. For researchers who study verbal irony, a critical question is: How do we grasp the meaning of ironic language? The parallel-constraint-satisfaction approach holds promise as an answer to this question. By this account, multiple cues to ironic intent, such as tone of voice, incongruity, and knowledge of the speaker, are processed rapidly and in parallel and this information is coordinated with the utterance itself in order to construct a coherent interpretation that is the best fit for the activated information. Recently, research with individuals who struggle with irony comprehension (typically developing children, individuals with autism-spectrum disorder, individuals with brain injury) has provided new clues about the complex process by which ironic meaning is inferred.     

Children's Comprehension of Critical and Complimentary Forms of Verbal Irony

The existing research on children's comprehension of verbal irony has focused exclusively on children's understanding of ironic criticisms. Two experiments examined 5- and 6-year-old children's ability to detect the nonliteral nature and intended meaning of both ironic criticism and ironic praise as depicted in short, videotaped stories. Considered together, the results from these experiments permit several conclusions: First, the data confirm earlier research suggesting that children's detection of nonliteral utterances and their interpretation of the speaker's pragmatic intent are separable components of early irony comprehension. Second, children's ability to detect ironic statements is asymmetrical across critical and complimentary forms of irony. Finally, although children more readily detect ironic criticisms, explicit echoic cues play an important role in facilitating uniquely their detection of ironic compliments. We discuss these results in the context of social pragmatic theories of early communicative development (e.g., Bruner, 1983; Tomasello, 1992, 1995) and with reference to a recent allusional-pretense model of irony comprehension proposed for mature speakers (Kumon-Nakamura, Glucksberg, & Brown, 1995).     

Eye Gaze Provides a Window on Children's Understanding of Verbal Irony

We investigated how children solve the interpretive problem of verbal irony. Children 5 to 8 years of age and a group of adults were presented with ironic and literal remarks in the context of short puppet shows. The speaker puppet's personality was manipulated as a cue to intent; that is, speakers were described as funny or serious. We measured all participants' interpretations of the remarks and also children's eye gaze and response latencies as they made their interpretations. As expected, children were less accurate than adults in their judgments of speaker intent. Although children took longer to judge speaker intent for ironic remarks than literal remarks, eye gaze data showed no evidence that children had a literal-first bias in their processing of ironic language. Instead, children's eye gaze behavior suggested that they considered an ironic interpretation even in the earliest moments of processing. We argue that these results are most consistent with a parallel constraint satisfaction framework for irony comprehension.     

Children's understanding and production of verbal irony in family conversations

This study examined how children use and understand various forms of irony (sarcasm, hyperbole, understatement, and rhetorical questions) in the context of naturalistic positive and negative family conversations in the home. Instances of ironic language in conversations between mothers, fathers, and their two children (M_ages=6.33 and 4.39 years) were recorded during six 90‐min observations for each of 39 families. Children's responses to others' ironic utterances were coded for their understanding of meaning and conversational function. Mothers were especially likely to ask rhetorical questions and to use ironic language in conflictual contexts. In contrast, fathers used hyperbole and understatement as frequently as rhetorical questions, and employed ironic language in both positive and conflictual contexts. Children also showed evidence of a nascent ability to use ironic language, especially hyperbole and rhetorical questions. Family members used rhetorical questions and understatement proportionately more often in a negative interaction context. Finally, older siblings understood irony better than younger siblings, and both children's responses revealed some understanding of ironic language, particularly sarcasm and rhetorical questions. Overall, the results suggest that family conversations in the home may be one important context for the development of children's use and understanding of ironic language.     

The on-line processing of written irony

We report an eye-tracking study in which we investigate the on-line processing of written irony. Specifically, participants’ eye movements were recorded while they read sentences which were either intended ironically, or non-ironically, and subsequent text which contained pronominal reference to the ironic (or non-ironic) phrase. Results showed longer reading times for ironic comments compared to a non-ironic baseline, suggesting that additional processing was required in ironic compared to non-ironic conditions. Reading times for subsequent pronominal reference indicated that for ironic materials, both the ironic and literal interpretations of the text were equally accessible during on-line language comprehension. This finding is most in-line with predictions of the graded salience hypothesis, which, in conjunction with the retention hypothesis, states that readers represent both the literal and ironic interpretation of an ironic utterance.     

Verbal irony processing: How do contrast and humour correlate?

Verbal irony relies on contrast, that is, incongruity between the situational context and the ironic assertion. But is the degree of contrast related to the perceived humorousness of ironic comments? We answered this question by conducting two experiments. In the first experiment, participants were asked to read a list of sentence pairs (ironic or control) and judge the extent to which the meaning of the first sentence contrasted with that of the second. In the second experiment, participants were invited to rate the humorousness of ironic comments compared with their literal counterparts. Results showed that ironic remarks were rated as more contrasting and more humorous than their literal counterparts, but that humour only emerged from a moderate contrast.