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.     

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.     

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 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.     

语调在6~10岁儿童对不同类型反语认知中的作用

以态度、话语含义和语言现象探测为测量指标,探讨语调对6~10岁儿童不同类型反语认知的影响。结果表明：（1）6~10岁是儿童反语认知能力迅速提高的时期,这不仅表现在儿童对说话人态度和话语含义的理解上,还表现在儿童对反语现象的解释上。但是儿童在反语认知的不同方面表现出发展的不平衡性,6岁儿童已能初步理解反语中说话人的态度和话语的含义,但还不能正确解释反语现象;直至10岁,儿童解释反语现象的能力仍在发展之中。（2）语调（中性语调和强调语调）影响儿童对他人态度和话语含义的理解,在强调语调下,儿童能更好地理解说话人的态度和话语的含义;但语调不影响儿童对语言现象的解释。（3）儿童对不同类型反语（反语批评和反语恭维）认知水平不同,6岁儿童对两类反语的态度判断、话语含义判断和语言现象解释均不存在显著差异;8岁和10岁儿童对两类反语的态度判断和话语含义判断也不存在显著差异,但在语言现象解释上存在显著差异。与反语恭维相比,8岁和10岁儿童能更好地解释反语批评     

Do social norms,false belief understanding,and metacognitive vocabulary influence irony comprehension? A study of five- and seven-year-old children

This study explores the effects of violating socially shared versus situationally defined norms on the understanding of ironic statements in 70 Italian-speaking five- and seven-year-old children. We also considered the possible relationships between irony understanding, receptive and metacognitive vocabulary, and false belief understanding. The results showed that violating socially shared norms does not benefit younger children's understanding of irony, although it does help older children's understanding. Ironic utterances that violate situationally defined norms were understood similarly across the two age groups. First- and second-order false belief understanding did not predict children's ability to interpret irony, although metacognitive vocabulary did predict interpretation for the seven-year-old group in instances of violating a situationally defined norm.     

Irony and second-order false belief in children: What changes when mothers rather than siblings speak?

This study explored irony understanding in school-age children, when the irony is used in two different family relations: between a child and the child's mother and between a child and a sibling. Two irony task typologies were used to assess 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds' understanding of the intended and expressed meanings (Study 1: N = 77; Study 2: N = 30). Results proved that the relationship with the mother, more than the relationship with a sibling, supported children's irony understanding. A predictive effect of second-order false-belief understanding on irony comprehension was also found. The findings support the hypothesis that the irony understanding, at least in the acquisition phase, depends on the relational contexts in which it is used. The predictive effect of second-order recursive thinking confirms and extends the role of theory of mind in the management of ironic communication.     

Understanding of literal truth, ironic criticism, and deceptive praise following childhood head injury.

Children with closed head injury (CHI) have semantic-pragmatic language problems that include difficulty in understanding and producing both literal and nonliteral statements. For example, they are relatively insensitive to some of the social messages in nonstandard communication as well as to words that code distinctions among mental states. This suggests that they may have difficulty with comprehension tasks involving first- and second-order intentionality, such as those involved in understanding irony and deception. We studied how 6- to 15-year-old children, typically developing or with CHI, interpret scenarios involving literal truth, ironic criticism, and deceptive praise. Children with severe CHI had overall poorer mastery of the task. Even mild CHI impaired the ability to understand the intentionality underlying deceptive praise. CHI, especially biologically significant CHI, appears to place children at risk for failure to understand language as externalized thought.     

Form and function in children's understanding of ironic utterances

Children's use of contextual discrepancy and stressed intonation to interpret literal form and illocutionary function in the use of ironic utterances was examined in two experiments. First and third grade children (6 and 8 years of age, respectively) and college adults were read short stories consisting of an utterance by a speaker and contextual information that was either neutral or that biased an ironic or literal interpretation of the utterance. The intonation of the utterance was either stressed or unstressed. Questions were asked about the literal form of the utterance, and the speaker's attitude in using the utterance. The results suggest that evaluation of the literal form and inference to the speaker's intended use of an utterance are independent components of irony comprehension in children: that contextual discrepancy and intonation function differently in cueing these processes; and that children and adults differ both in accomplishing these processes and in the use of these cues.     

Children's developmental understanding of ethnicity and race

Research on children's development of ethnic cognition from preschool through adolescence was reviewed. This review was based on research conducted on (a) children's ethnic cognition, (b) children's social-cognitive development, (c) children's understanding of a variety of social status, and (d) Quintana's model of children's understanding of ethnicity. Four developmental levels were described: Integration of affective and perceptual understanding of ethnicity (level 0), literal understanding of ethnicity (level 1), social and nonliteral perspective of ethnicity (level 2), and ethnic-group consciousness and ethnic identity (level 3). For each developmental level, applied implications were discussed.     

The Development of Narrative Comprehension and Its Relation to Other Early Reading Skills

The first goal of this study was to examine young children's developing narrative comprehension abilities using theory-based, authentic measures of comprehension processes. The second goal was to examine the relations among young children's comprehension abilities and other early reading skills. Children ages 4 and 6 listened to or watched two authentic narratives. We measured their comprehension of these narratives as well as vocabulary and skills associated with word decoding. The results revealed that even the younger children were sensitive to the underlying structure of the narratives and that this sensitivity increased with age. Measures of narrative comprehension were not consistently correlated with skills associated with word decoding, such as phonological awareness. The results are discussed in terms of theoretical models of comprehension and of reading development. Practical implications of the findings are also explored.     

One Frog, Two Frog, Red Frog, Blue Frog: Factors Affecting Children's Syntactic Choices in Production and Comprehension

Two experiments are reported which examine children's ability to use referential context when making syntactic choices in language production and comprehension. In a recent on-line study of auditory comprehension, Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, and Logrip (1999) examined children's and adults' abilities to resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities involving prepositional phrases (e.g., “Put the frog on the napkin into ¨”). Although adults and older children used the referential context to guide their initial analysis (pursuing a destination interpretation in a one-frog context and a modifier interpretation in a two-frog context), 4 to 5-year olds' initial and ultimate analysis was one of destination, regardless of context. The present studies examined whether these differences were attributable to the comprehension process itself or to other sources, such as possible differences in how children perceive the scene and referential situation. In both experiments, children were given a language generation task designed to elicit and test children's ability to refer to a member of a set through restrictive modification. This task was immediately followed by the “put” comprehension task. The findings showed that, in response to a question about a member of a set (e.g., “Which frog went to Mrs. Squid's house?”), 4- to 5-year-olds frequently produced a definite NP with a restrictive prepositional modifier (e.g., “The one on the napkin”). These same children, however, continued to misanalyze put instructions, showing a strong avoidance of restrictive modification during comprehension. Experiment 2 showed that an increase in the salience of the platforms that distinguished the two referents increased overall performance, but still showed the strong asymmetry between production and comprehension. Eye movements were also recorded in Experiment 2, revealing on-line parsing patterns similar to Trueswell et al.: an initial preference for a destination analysis and a failure to revise early referential commitments. These experiments indicate that child–adult differences in parsing preferences arise, in part, from developmental changes in the comprehension process itself and not from a general insensitivity to referential properties of the scene. The findings are consistent with a probabilistic model for uncovering the structure of the input during comprehension, in which more reliable linguistic and discourse-related cues are learned first, followed by a gradually developing ability to take into account other more uncertain (or more difficult to learn) cues to structure.     

Concurrent Relations Between Perspective-Taking Skills,Desire Understanding,and Internal-State Vocabulary

Recent studies suggest that there appears to be a similar developmental sequence in the understanding of mental states in both internal-state language and in standard theory-of-mind tasks. These findings suggest possible developmental relations between children's ability to talk and think about the mind. Two experiments investigated the concurrent relations between internal-state vocabulary and theory-of-mind abilities in 30-month-old toddlers. In Experiment 1, children's internal-state language vocabulary was significantly and specifically related to their concurrent understanding of others' visual and emotional perspectives and was less strongly related to desire understanding. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these findings by examining the link between internal-state vocabulary and visual perspective-taking and comprehension of own versus other's desire, controlling for general verbal skills. Children with a more developed internal-state vocabulary performed better on perspective-taking tasks. These findings suggest that labeling and reasoning about mental states are related abilities at the early stages of theory-of-mind development.     

Paralinguistic processing in children with callosal agenesis: emergence of neurolinguistic deficits

Recent research revealed impaired processing of both nonliteral meaning and affective prosody in adults with agenesis of the corpus callosum (ACC) and normal intelligence. Since normal children have incomplete myelination of the corpus callosum, it was hypothesized that paralanguage deficits in children with ACC would be less apparent relative to their peers. The Familiar and Novel Language Comprehension Test (FANL-C) and Prosody Test were given to 18 children with ACC and normal intelligence and 17 controls matched for age (7-13 years), education, and IQ (83-122). When controlling for age, children with ACC were significantly poorer in comprehension of the precise meaning of both literal and nonliteral items on the FANL-C. Adults with ACC had previously been shown to have difficulty only on nonliteral items. The effect size for nonliteral comprehension in children with ACC was smaller than that seen in adults. There was only a trend for the child ACC group to perform worse on the recognition of affective prosody. Thus, while deficits in paralinguistic processing were apparent, children with ACC were not as clearly different from age peers as adults, and were equally deficient at comprehending literal and nonliteral expressions. The differences in results between adults and children with ACC are thought to reflect incomplete callosal development in normal children, and the importance of the corpus callosum in the early stages of the development of the ability to process literal language.     

Impaired Interpretation of Others’ Behavior is Associated with Difficulties in Recognizing Pragmatic Language in Patients with Schizophrenia

Much attention has been paid to the pragmatic language function in schizophrenia. This study of Japanese patients with schizophrenia examined the relationship between impaired interpretation of the behaviors of other people in social contexts and the ability to recognize metaphor and irony. We assessed 34 patients with schizophrenia and 34 normal subjects using first- and second-order theory of mind tasks, the Metaphor and Sarcasm Scenario Test, and the Dewey Story Test (which tests the ability to judge others’ social behaviors). We compared the performance between the groups and analyzed correlations between the tasks. All tasks revealed significant deficits in the patients compared with the controls. In the patient group, metaphor comprehension was correlated with the ability to judge normal behaviors, and irony comprehension was correlated with the ability to judge abnormal behaviors, suggesting that deficits of social cognition in schizophrenia include these two types of factors associated with pragmatic language.     

Young Children's ability to Discriminate between Antisocial and Prosocial Teases

The present study was designed to (a) examine 5- to 8-year-old children's ability to discriminate between antisocial and prosocial teases and (b) determine whether their age and experiences within the home are associated with their ability to recognize these two types of teases. Results revealed that the 5- to 8-year-old children were able to discriminate between antisocial and prosocial teases. Although the children's parents or legal guardians indicated that the children had more frequent experience with prosocial than antisocial teases in the home, (a) the children were better able to correctly identify the intent of antisocial teasers than prosocial teasers and (b) the parents or legal guardians (correctly) indicated that their child would be better able to recognize an antisocial tease than a prosocial tease. Despite the finding that the children's comprehension of antisocial teasing tended to exceed their comprehension of prosocial teasing, the findings indicate that being relatively young (i.e., 5–6 years old vs. 7–8 years old) and having relatively frequent experience with antisocial teasing in the home may be associated with some children's difficulty in recognizing the intent behind antisocial teases.     

Understanding the glue of narrative structure: Children's on- and off-line inferences about characters’ goals

Because characters’ goals play a key role in the structure of narratives, the ability to make inferences about goals is essential to narrative comprehension. Despite their importance, no previous studies have examined the process by which children make these goal inferences. In the current study, we examined 6- and 8-year-old children's goal inference making processes through think-aloud protocols. We also examined the product of comprehension, the mental representation of text, through free recall and comprehension questions. The results revealed that children of both ages regularly made appropriate goal inferences while listening to narratives. In addition, the number of goal inferences predicted children's recall of the stories. Thus, children as young as 6 years old are sensitive to the vital role of characters’ goals in narrative structure, and they can engage in sophisticated cognitive processing while they listen to narratives to form coherent mental representations of them.     

Syntactic Creativity Errors in Children's Wh-Questions

Previous work has reported that children creatively make syntactic errors that are ungrammatical in their target language, but are grammatical in another language. One of the most well-known examples is medial wh-question errors in English-speaking children's wh-questions (e.g., What do you think who the cat chased? from Thornton, 1990). The evidence for this non-target-like structure in both production and comprehension has been taken to support the existence of innate, syntactic parameters that define all possible grammatical variation, which serve as a top-down constraint guiding children's language acquisition process. The present study reports new story-based production and comprehension experiments that challenge this interpretation. While we replicated previous observations of medial wh-question errors in children's sentence production (Experiment 1), we saw a reduction in evidence indicating that English-speaking children assign interpretations that conform to the medial wh-question pattern (Experiment 2). Crucially, we found no correlation between production and comprehension errors (Experiment 3). We suggest that these errors are the result of children's immature sentence production mechanisms rather than immature grammatical knowledge.