The Development of Joke and Irony Understanding: A Study with 3- to 6-year-old Children

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68, 133-146.

The Development of Joke and Irony Understanding: A Study with 3- to 6-year-old

Children

Romina Angeleri and Gabriella Airenti

Center for Cognitive Science, Department of Psychology, University of Torino (Italy)

Abstract

Previous research suggests that comprehending ironic utterances is a relatively late-developing skill,

emerging around 5-6 years of age. This study investigated whether younger children might show an

earlier understanding when ironic utterances are performed in familiar communicative situations,

and investigated the relationships among irony comprehension, language, and theory of mind

abilities. A group of 100 children aged 3.0-6.5 years was presented with four types of puppet

scenarios depicting different communicative interactions: control, joke, contingent irony and

background irony stories. Results suggested that (a) even younger children easily understand jokes,

and may sometimes understand ironies; (b) children’s comprehension of irony continues to develop

across early childhood; and (c) receptive vocabulary scores had simultaneous effects on irony

comprehension and ToM performance.

Keywords: verbal irony; theory of mind; communication; developmental pragmatics

CHILDREN’S UNDERSTANDING OF JOKE AND IRONY - 2 -

Introduction

Verbal irony is a form of nonliteral communication and many different definitions have been

provided in the literature (Attardo, 2000; Clark & Gerrig, 1984; Kreuz & Glucksberg, 1989;

Kumon-Nakamura, Glucksberg, & Brown, 1995; Wilson & Sperber, 1992). Developmental

research has shown that the comprehension of ironic utterances is a particularly complex task for

children (Capelli, Nakagawa, & Madden, 1990; Filippova & Astington, 2008; Winner, 1988). A

number of studies have focused on the different aspects connected with the development of

children’s understanding of this communicative act (for a review see Creusere, 2000; Pexman &

Glenwright, 2007). In particular, irony comprehension has been compared with deceit and

metaphor. Some studies have investigated children’s difficulties in understanding intentional

falsehood, which is typical of deceit, politeness, and irony (Ackerman, 1981; Airenti & Angeleri,

2011; Peterson, Peterson, & Seeto, 1983). It has been shown that children as old as 13 years of age

often fail to distinguish irony from deception (Demorest, Meyer, Phelps, Gardner, & Winner, 1984;

Demorest, Silberstein, Gardner, & Winner, 1983). Data from other studies indicate much earlier

competence (e.g., Andrews, Rosenblatt, Malkus, Gardner, & Winner, 1986), and the conclusion of

most studies is that children’s comprehension of irony starts between the age of five and six years

(e.g., Dews & Winner, 1997) and continues developing over time.

The particular difficulty in interpreting ironic utterances has often been attributed to the

complexity of the inferences involved in comprehension, which are assumed to require a full-

fledged theory of mind (ToM). Several studies have shown that children’s inability to grasp the

meaning of ironic phrases may be connected with their difficulties in inferring the speaker’s beliefs

and intentions (Sullivan, Winner, & Hopfield, 1995; Winner, Brownell, Happé, Blum, & Pincus,

1998; Winner & Leekam, 1991). According to Winner (1988), in order to understand irony the child

has to be able to detect incongruity or falsehood, infer motivation, and attribute second-order beliefs

to the speaker. Ackerman (1983) suggested that in children’s comprehension of irony two

independent processes can be distinguished, i.e., the detection of the nonliteral form cued by


contextual discrepancy and the process of inferring the speaker’s intent cued by intonation.

Hancock, Dunham and Purdy (2000) confirmed this dissociation and attributed it to the fact that

detection demands first-order reasoning about the speaker’s beliefs while inferring the speaker’s

intent requires inferences on the speaker’s beliefs about the listener’s beliefs, i.e. second-order

reasoning.

The same developmental sequence has been confirmed by Filippova and Astington (2008) in

a study comparing children and adults. These authors stress the fact that interpreting irony is

difficult for children and that this ability improves with age. In fact even the 9-year-old participants

in their study did not reach adult skill levels. The progression was correlated with understanding of

mind and linguistic abilities. Filippova and Astington (2010) confirmed that the interpretation of

complex mental states implied in irony (i.e., speaker’s intention, motivation and attitude) was

difficult for children and developed beyond middle-school years. However, they also found that for

children interpreting the function of ironic utterances (i.e., how nice, mean, funny they are) was

easier. This was viewed again in terms of theory of mind. One’s own evaluation of the

communicative effect of irony demands an intuitive judgment on a situation while inferring a

speaker’s complex mental states demands metarepresentational reasoning.

In another study focused on the detection of verbal irony, Nilsen, Glenwright, and Huyder

(2011) presented children with video recordings where two puppets interacted in different

communicative contexts (literal criticism, ironic criticism, and literal compliment), and then asked

them questions about the listener’s interpretations and beliefs. They found that 8- to 10-year-old

children were able to consider the listener’s knowledge state when they had to interpret verbal

irony. In particular, children of that age performed similarly to adults when answering questions

about the listener’s beliefs, showing their ability to represent the listener’s knowledge state and the

listener’s interpretation of the speaker’s statement, while younger children (6- to 7- year-olds) had

difficulties understanding the listener’s interpretation. Thus, in line with previous research, they


found that children’s second-order theory of mind skills are related to their ability to interpret verbal

irony, allowing children to be more flexible in their interpretations.

Although several developmental studies have assessed children's understanding of irony

during middle and late childhood, there is still a need for data regarding irony comprehension in

younger children. To the best of our knowledge, there is only one study that has shown an initial

comprehension of irony in young children (Loukusa & Leinonen, 2008). This study involved

children aged 3 to 9 years, and showed that even if the majority of children could correctly interpret

verbal irony only between six and seven years of age, some 3 and 4-year-olds showed an emerging

ability to recognize the communicative intent in simple ironic utterances. Interestingly, this study

was conducted on Finnish children, opening a window on cultural settings and languages other than

English.

All the results reported above are based on experimental studies focused on the

comprehension of ironic language, where children had to understand and evaluate dialogues

presented within stories, cartoons or puppet shows. Recently some works have tried to address the

issue of when and how children begin to produce irony, examining various forms of irony during

interactions in the family context. Pexman and colleagues (2009) studied the use of ironic gestures

and utterances in family triads of one parent and two children recorded while they completed a

cooperative dominos task. Their conclusion was that irony production might begin at the same age

as irony comprehension (the age of the youngest child to use verbal irony was 5.34 years). In a

similar way, Recchia and colleagues (2010) examined the use of irony in conversations between

parents and their 4 and 6-year-old children at home. Their results showed that even 4-year-old

children occasionally used verbal irony, usually hyperbole, even if less frequently than their older

siblings. Thus, there is some evidence that children can begin to produce ironic utterances at around

4 years of age.

Besides considering irony as a form of non-literal communication, it is also possible to

examine the discourse goals that are accomplished by its use. In many cases, irony is used with


humorous intent (e.g., Long & Graesser, 1988; Roberts & Kreuz, 1994); thus another possibility is

to study the development of irony with respect to the development of humor. The relationship

between irony and humor arises from studies conducted among adult subjects, revealing that they

consider ironic utterances funnier than literal ones (e.g., Colston & Keller, 1998; Gibbs, 2000;

Kreuz, Long, & Church, 1991). As regards children, it has been suggested that it is not before 7–8

years of age that children start appreciating the humorous aspect of irony (Dews et al., 1996; Harris

& Pexman, 2003). Pexman and colleagues (2005) have tried to find an explanation of this result.

They suggested that children do not appreciate the humor function of verbal irony in the same way

that adults do, as they are only beginning to share adults' perceptions that ironic utterances (in

particular, in case of ironic criticism) are intended to be funnier than literal remarks. In their study,

children tended to identify themselves with the victims of criticism, and had difficulties in dealing

with conflicting representations of emotions and intentions.

From a theoretical point of view, in the pragmatics literature a number of authors have tried to

clarify the relation between irony and humor (Attardo, 2002; Giora, 1995; Ritchie, 2005). Despite

the definitional problems, due to the partial overlapping of different categories, irony is generally

included in the broad category of conversational humor (Attardo, 2002; Norrick, 2003). However,

little research has spanned both humor and irony (Attardo, 2002).

With respect to development, even if it seems useful to study irony in connection with other

forms of humor, this aim may be difficult to achieve, given that while most studies on irony are

experimental and focused on comprehension, empirical work on the development of humor in

young children is mostly based on naturalistic observations of interactions in family, daily care, and

nursery school (Bergen, 1989; Cameron, Kennedy & Cameron, 2008; Groch, 1974; Hoicka &

Akhtar, 2012; Loizou, 2005; Reddy, 2008). Therefore, the heterogeneity of both methods and

communicative contexts makes comparing their results arduous.


However, we assume that considering irony on the background of the wider phenomenon of

humor can be suitable to understand how children deal with different aspects of playful

communication since a young age.

Studies on young children have shown that simple forms of humor appear very early in child

development, reflecting how important these emotional responses become in the interactions with

the adults (Dunn, 1988). Laughter appears in infants at about four months (Sroufe & Piccard

Wunsch, 1972) and at around 10 months children both respond to humorous situations and produce

humorous acts themselves such as clowning and teasing (Reddy, 1991).

From a cognitive point of view, humor has been defined as the discovery of some incongruity

with respect to reality (McGhee, 1979; Shultz, 1976). From this perspective, the development of the

capacity of understanding and producing humor is related to children’s ability to construct symbolic

representations of reality, which emerges at around 18 months of age, when children become able to

deal with fantasy and pretend play suggesting some abilities to separate representations and

realities. The relation between children’s symbolic play and verbal humor has been supported by a

case study in which all the productions of verbal humor in a child from 15 to 30 months of age have

been systematically documented as a function of conceptual complexity (Johnson & Mervis, 1997).

According to Shultz (1976), the real appreciation of humor demands that children are able not only

to represent incongruities, but also to resolve them, and this ability emerges not before 6 years of

age.

However, the necessity of representation and resolution of incongruity for humor appreciation

remains controversial. Some other authors have maintained that even very young children may

experience humor as far as they are able to detect incongruities in reality, and to adopt a playful

attitude. In this perspective it is an expectancy violation in reality, like the mother failing to

reappear in a peek-a-boo game or someone slipping on a banana peel that is perceived as funny

(Pien & Rothbart, 1976). The playful attitude makes possible for children to respond to incongruity

with humor, without confounding it with other emotions, as for example astonishment or fear


(Bariaud, 1989). The playful attitude of humor may be in effect mingled with an aggressive

component or be perceived as aggressive (Veatch, 1998).

From an analysis of the literature we can conclude that irony shares with other forms of

humor some basic mechanisms:

a) They are all based on some form of incongruity or contrast (Colston & O’Brien, 2000), as

what the humorist does or says goes against expectations in a funny way. With respect to irony the

simplest situation is that of an utterance blatantly contradicting reality as when someone says

“Another gorgeous day!” while it is raining heavily. There are several other kinds of irony forms

but all have in common the use of incongruity shared between the interlocutors to suggest a

discrepancy between reality and expectation (Gibbs, 1994).

b) Moreover, in humor as well as in irony there is often a latent aggressive component. With

respect to humor teasing is the typical example (Keltner, Capps, Kring, Young, & Heerey, 2001),

but this is also the case of laughing at someone sliding on a banana peel. Irony often implies

criticism even if sometimes, but in fact rather rarely, also compliments are expressed in an ironic

form. In fact there is a controversy about the function of irony with respect to criticism. According

to the tinge hypothesis one function of irony is precisely to decrease the negativity of criticisms

(Dews, Kaplan, & Winner, 1995). Other authors have found that on the contrary irony enhances

criticism (Colston, 1997; Toplak & Katz, 2000).

c) Finally, understanding the effects of humor and irony, requires to consider the expansion

of the common ground between the interlocutors (Clark, 1996). Adults and children share the

ability to detect “affordances for funniness” (Reddy, 2008). This is what allows perceiving or

constructing together humorous situations and sharing amusement. As regards irony, the only way

to distinguish between ironic and serious utterances is by focusing on shared attitudes and

expectations (Airenti, Bara, & Colombetti, 1993). It is at the core of different theories of irony the

consideration that irony is the reminder of (Kreuz & Glucksberg, 1989), the echo of (Wilson &


Sperber, 1992), the allusion to (Kumon-Nakamura, Glucksberg, & Brown, 1995) something that

interlocutors are supposed to share.

In conclusion, there are different definitions of irony, which focus on different aspects of

irony and its pragmatic function. We consider that, instead of adopting one of them we can operate

relying on a simplified definition that includes the main features that the different models present in

the literature have identified: irony is a nonliteral utterance which demands to be understood sharing

a common ground, is focused on an unexpected incongruity and has a teasing aspect.

Starting from this simplified definition of irony we make the general hypothesis that young

children may understand the communicative intent of ironic utterances even if they are unable to

identify a utterance as ironic, i.e. to explicitly explain their understanding in terms of others’ mental

states. Children could directly access the communicative intent before being able to attribute

second-order beliefs. Actually, we try to depart from the procedure utilized in most of the cited

studies, in which children were asked to evaluate utterances so as to judge the speaker’s intentions

and motivations, or to rank utterances on the basis of how mean, or teasing, or funny they are. We

move from the assumption that young children could understand these aspects of ironic utterances

while being unable to verbally explain them. In the Finnish study (Loukusa & Leinonen, 2008),

children who initially gave correct answers were not always able to subsequently provide an

explanation. This might clarify the discrepancy between the findings of experimental and

observational studies; in the latter, even young children appear to understand and produce humorous

and ironic sentences in the context of everyday interactions. In this respect Gibbs and O’Brien

(1991) in their discussion of the psychological understanding of irony made an interesting point,

arguing that people do not need to recognize irony to comprehend what the speakers mean by their

ironic utterances. This conclusion was based on the finding that adults were able to give correct

paraphrase judgments for ironic expressions even if they were not always conscious of their ironic

character (Gibbs, 1986).


Children are precociously involved in humorous interactions with parents. This develops

children’s communicative abilities and facilitates the construction of a common ground for

comprehension. It is on this aspect that the present study is based.

Thus we proposed to distinguish between the ability to comprehend the communicative intent

of ironic utterances—which, in our perspective, relies on basic communicative abilities—and the

ability to explicitly acknowledge the components and features of irony—which demands second-

order ToM abilities and only develops later in childhood.

Taking the standpoint that irony is a form of humor involves the question of what

distinguishes one form of humor from another. A theoretical analysis of all the different forms of

humor goes beyond the scope of this paper. Actually the boundaries between the subcategories are

fuzzy, no clear distinctions have been established in the literature and it is even unclear if providing

definitions of the different humorous phenomena is an attainable task (Attardo, 1994; 2002;

Norrick, 1993). Distinctions may involve the opposition between literal and nonliteral or the

different degrees of knowledge constituting the common ground requested for comprehension or

how teasing they are. Moreover, different configurations of these aspects can make the

comprehension of some forms more difficult than others.

Our standpoint that irony is a form of humor allowed us to compare in a single study young

children comprehension of irony and joke. We have used the term joke as dictionaries define it:

something said or done for cause amusement or a trick played for fun. Jokes result from the fact that

what is said or done is unexpected and then incongruous with respect to reality and are in general

mildly teasing. We considered that simple literal jokes could be good instances of unsophisticated

humor. As regards irony, the traditional definition of Grice considered only the case in which an

utterance is taken to have a meaning opposite to its literal content (Grice, 1975, 1978). Most post-

Gricean theories adopt the point of view of Sperber & Wilson (1981) who argued that there are

several forms of irony where the intended meaning is not simply the opposite of the literal one.

With respect to development it is possible that not all the forms of irony present the same level of


difficulty (Bosco & Bucciarelli, 2008). In our study, we have distinguished two forms, contingent

irony and background irony, that we have supposed to be of different difficulty with respect to

comprehension due to the different access to common ground they involve.

We assessed understanding presenting to 3.0-to-6.5- year-old children a number of scenarios

in which two puppets handled by two experimenters were involved in four types of simple

communicative interactions: (1) literal factual serious communicative acts that can be conceived as

control items (e.g., one puppet plays ball and the other says: “I like playing ball too”), (2) joke, i.e.

non serious utterances (e.g., the puppets laughed at the experimenter making funny faces and one

puppet said to the other “Look, what funny faces!”), (3) contingent irony, the most simple case of

irony, based on what we call a form of manifest sharedness. The irony in this case derives from the

negation of something that is directly perceived by the interlocutors, (e.g., one puppet fails to score

a basket and the other says: “Your shot was pretty good!”), and finally (4) background irony, a

different case of irony, based on what we can call a form of previously acquired sharedness (e.g.,

one puppet breaks a plate and the other says: “Your mommy will be happy!”), where irony is based

on something that the interlocutors are supposed to share but which is not directly perceived or

mentioned (in this case, the fact that the mother is not happy when her child breaks something).

It is important to note that children were presented with simple interactions depicting familiar

situations (e.g., puppets playing with sand, playing basket, and so on), and we asked them open

questions with the purpose of creating a relatively naturalistic communicative situation, which

offered the opportunity to provide expansive and comprehensive answers. Our objective was to

have children providing their interpretation of the communicative acts instead of orienting them to

give judgments using predefined aspects of irony. Moreover, we proposed to put forward the

humorous component of irony placing side-by-side ironic utterances and joking situations. In

particular we focused on common ground, i.e. shared knowledge that constitutes the basis for

comprehension (Clark, 1996). We considered that in situations where the common ground is easy to


deal with, even young children would be able to understand jokes, and probably also some forms of

irony.

Our expectations were the following:

1) All children—even the younger ones—would be able to understand the humorous intent

underlying joke situations.

2) At least some children in the younger groups would succeed in the irony comprehension

task. We suggest that children are able to participate in communicative interactions in which

irony is in place not because they understand the exact nature of the ironic utterances (i.e.,

the use of non-literal language, the ironic intentions of the speaker, and so on), but because

they participate in a wide range of communicative interactions, becoming more and more

familiar with the use of communicative practices and activities. Thus if the children are

presented with familiar interactions their performances in the experimental situations should

be more similar to the ones observed in everyday life.

3) Joke and irony understanding would show different stages of development. We predicted

that joke is the easiest form, followed in turn by contingent irony, and finally by background

irony. The basis of this prediction was the assumption that jokes make very early part of

young children interactions with adults and are based on incongruities immediately

perceived while irony is constructed on the basis of more elaborated knowledge. In turn, the

common ground shared by the participants in the contingent situation is more direct than in

the background situation, which appear more demanding.

4) Finally, in order to investigate the critical factors involved in irony understanding, we

explored its relationship with ToM abilities and child receptive vocabulary as a measure of

language development, two aspects that the literature has shown as strongly related (e.g.,

Lewis & Osborne, 1990; Milligan, Astington, & Dack, 2007; O’Neill, 2005).


Method

Participants

A total of 100 Italian children (50 girls, 50 boys) were tested. All children were recruited

through kindergarten centers and elementary schools from the greater Turin area. The mean age for

children was 4.77 years (SD = 1.14 yrs). The global sample was divided into the following four age

group: twenty-five 3.0- to 3.5-year-olds (M = 3.34 yrs; SD = 2.1 months), twenty-five 4.0- to 4.5-

year-olds (M = 4.25 yrs; SD = 1.8 mo), twenty-five 5.0- to 5.5-year-olds (M = 5.19 yrs; SD = 3.88

mo) and twenty-five 6.0 to 6.5-year-olds (M = 6.32 yrs; SD = 2.88 mo). For the sake of simplicity,

we will refer to the four age groups as 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds. Each

age group included an equal number of boys and girls. Criteria for inclusion were that participants

had no history of speech and language difficulties, were Italian native speakers, and had no known

significant medical or neurological condition. Parents were informed about the research details and

provided informed consent for their children to participate in our study.

In order to check the consistency of language ability in each age group, children were

administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test – Revised (PPVT-R; Dunn & Dunn, 1981;

Italian adaptation: Stella, Pizzioli, & Tressoldi, 2000). The mean scores for each group are reported

with other participants’ details in Table 1. All children were within the normal range. Moreover, to

ensure homogeneity of linguistic ability within each age group, Grubb’s test was used in the

statistical evaluation of the data to identify outliers. For the PPVT-R no outliers were detected at the

95% significance level within each age group, consequently we did not exclude any participants

from the sample. As it will be clear in the Result section, the scores obtained using the PPVT-R

were further analyzed to examine the contribution of verbal skills in irony understanding.

– Table 1 about here –


Socio-economic status (SES) was measured by family composition, parental education level

and occupation, and was obtained using the Two-Factor Index of Social Position (ISP) developed

by Hollingshead (1975), combining information about parents’ jobs and educational attainment.

Parents were free to decide whether they would complete the SES questionnaires; 9 families did not

return the questionnaire. According to the parent reports of the remaining 91 families, the majority

of children were from the middle social class (47.2%), but other classes were also represented

(lower: 9.7%; lower-middle: 25%; upper-middle: 13.9%; and upper: 4.2%). Only 4.2% of children

lived with one single parents, while 95.8% of children lived with two married or cohabiting parents.

Material

Irony task.

Sixteen puppet show scenarios were depicted; we created scenarios that were likely to be

familiar to the 3.0- to 6.5-year-old children (e.g., playing with sand, eating cakes, going for a bike

ride). Some examples of the puppet scenarios are given in the Appendix. In each scenario, two

puppets were involved in a communicative interaction; the speaker-puppet did not perform any

action but produced an utterance in response to the other puppet’s behavior. The utterance might

have been a simple and common comment (control situation), a joke, or an ironic utterance; the

utterances were equivalent in terms of length and syntactical difficulties. In more detail, there were

4 different types of scenarios (4 scenarios for each type):

1) Control stories, where the speaker puppet produced a literal, factual, and serious comment

spoken with matter-of-fact tone in response to the other puppet’s behavior (contextual cues

present);

2) Joke, where the speaker puppet produced an utterance spoken with joking tone to evoke

laughter or amusement (contextual cue present);


3) Contingent irony, where the speaker puppet produced an ironic utterance spoken with

joking tone that implied the negation of something directly perceived by the interlocutors

(contextual cue present);

4) Background irony, where the speaker puppet produced an ironic utterance spoken with

joking tone that could be comprehended only refering to shared knowledge, e.g., normally children

don’t like spinach, any mom tries to stop sibling squabbles, and so on (contextual cue absent). The

proposed situations are expected to refer to contexts in which children are involved from very early

on and therefore familiar and shared among all young children.

Theory of mind tasks.

Three ToM tasks were used in the present study. These tasks examined the ability to

understand first- and second-order false belief. First-order false belief tasks required a child to make

an inference concerning a false belief about a state of the world; to examine this ability we used the

following two tasks: the Smarties task (Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987), and the Sally-Ann task

(Wimmer & Perner, 1983).

In the Smarties task, children were shown a familiar container (in this case, a Pringles box,

due to the fact that Smarties boxes are no longer familiar to Italian children) and were asked to

indicate what it held. Then the unusual contents were revealed (i.e., a pencil) and the children were

asked what a person who had not seen the pencil would have said was inside the container.

For the Sally-Ann task, we followed the experimental procedure suggested by Baron-Cohen,

Leslie and Frith (1985). We presented children with two dolls, Sally and Ann, and first we asked

children the naming question (“Who is this doll? And this one?”) in order to check that the children

knew which doll was which. Then Sally placed a ball into her basket, and left the scene; the ball

was transferred by Ann and hidden in her box. When Sally returned, the experimenter asked the

critical Belief question: “Where will Sally look for her ball?”. If the children replied/pointed to the

previous location of the ball, then they correctly responded the belief question by appreciating


Sally’s present false belief. If they replied/pointed to the ball’s current location, then they failed the

belief question by not taking into account the doll’s belief. These conclusions were warranted if two

control questions were answered correctly: “Where is the marble really?” (reality question); “Where

was the marble in the beginning?” (memory question).

Second-order stories investigate the ability to understand a false belief about another

character’s belief; to examine this ability we used the Ice-cream van story task (Baron-Cohen,

1989). The story was read to the children who were shown a paperboard model scenario presenting

the action sequencies involved in the story. John and Mary are together in the park. Along comes

the ice-cream man. John would like to buy an ice cream but has no money with him. The ice-cream

man tells him to go home and get his money. In the meantime he will be staying in the park. When

John comes home to get the money, the ice-cream man moves to the church. Later John meets the

ice-cream man in front of the church, but Mary does not know about that because she came back

home before. Children were then asked: “Where does Mary think that John has gone to buy an ice-

cream?”

Procedure

Children were tested individually in a separate quiet room outside of their classroom. The

PPVT-R and all theory of mind tests were presented first. Then, two puppets were introduced to the

children. The various objects involved in the experimental scenarios were all placed in a small bag;

during the experimental sessions, they were taken from the bag and put on the table in front of the

children. After every puppet show, each child was asked: “Why did the puppet say that?”

Throughout the interviews, the experimenter used some prompts to elucidate

children’s responses to the questions and/or to obtain explanations of the responses; the prompt

questions were the same for each child, but they were used only when the child was briefly

distracted or the responses were ambiguous, and they did not necessarily indicate a failure in the

comprehension task.


In order to further clarify the experimental protocol used in the present study, we report some

examples of items:

(1) Control story

Puppet A is drawing; puppet B says: “So nice you’re drawing!”

Examiner: “Why did puppet B say that?”

If the child’s answer is not clear, ambiguous, or merely descriptive, the examiner gives a

prompt. For example, if the child replies “He’s drawing”, the examiner asks: “And why

did the puppet say that?”

(2) Joke

Puppet A makes funny faces; the two puppets are laughing. . Puppet B says: “Look! What

funny faces!”



prompt. For example:

If the child replies “Because he makes funny faces”, the examiner asks: “And why did the

puppet say that?”

(3) Contingent irony

Puppet A fails to score a basket; puppet B says: “Well done!”



prompt. For example:

If the child replies: “Because they are playing”, the examiner asks: “And why did the

puppet say that?”


If the child repeats: “Well done” the examiner asks: Was it well done? If the child replies

“No”, the examiner asks: “And why did the puppet say that?”

(4) Background irony

Puppet A broke a plate; puppet B says: “Your mom will be very happy!”



prompt.

For example:

If the child replies “Because he has broken a plate” the examiner asks: “And why did the

puppet say that?”

If the child replies “The mommy will be happy”, the examiner asks: “Will mommy be

happy?” If the child replies “No”, the examiner asks: “And why did the puppet say that?”

Narratives for the puppet scenarios were told by two experimenters who had been instructed

to use the appropriate tone according to the situations. For prompts the experimenters were

instructed to use a neutral tone in order to exclude any cue toward a preferred response, and to stop

after two prompts. The puppet scenarios were presented in random order.

The order of the sixteen scenarios was randomized across children. The experimental sessions

lasted approximately 40 minutes, permitting pauses if needed. All sessions were audiotaped and

children’s responses verbatim were transcribed.

Some more examples of experimental questions and children’s responses are given in the

Appendix.

Scoring Procedure

Irony task.


After every puppet scenario, there was a question (“Why did the puppet say that?”) involving

children’s understanding of the communicative intent. Only in the case that children made

ambiguous replies, the examiner posed a set of other questions aimed at clarifying children’s

understanding. Children’s replies obtained 1 point if they understood the joke/ironic communicative

intent; otherwise, they obtained a score of 0. Responses were considered correct if the children

identified the correct communicative intention as resulting from the explicit reference to the

puppet’s utterance, in order to avoid the possibility that children were generically referring to the

proposed situation.

We present here some examples of scoring.

(1) Control story

Puppet A is drawing; puppet B says: “So nice you’re drawing!”

Example of child’s answer: “Because he likes drawing” (score = 1)

Comment: In the answer the child recognizes the seriousness of the utterance.

Example of child’s answer : “I don’t know why” (score = 0)

(2) Joke

Puppet A makes funny faces; the two puppets are laughing. Puppet B says: “Look! What

funny faces!”

Example of child’s answer: “He said that because it is so fun” (score = 1)

Comment: In the answer the child recognizes that the puppet’s utterance is supposed to evoke

amusement.

Example of child’s answer: “Because they are laughing” (score = 0)

Comment: The child does not refer to the utterance but to the situation.

(3) Contingent irony

Puppet A fails to score a basket; puppet B says: “Well done!”


Example of child’s answer: “Because he wanted to make fun of him” (score = 1)

Comment: The child recognizes that the puppet’s answer is nonliteral and nonserious.

Example of child’s answer: “Because he was good at playing” (score = 0)

Comment: The child takes the puppet’s answer literaly.

(4) Background irony

Puppet A broke a plate; puppet B says: “Your mom will be very happy!”

Example of child’s answer: “That the mom will be mad!” (score = 1)

Comment: The child recognizes that the puppet’s answer is nonliteral.

Example of child’s answer: “That the mom will be happy” (Examiner: “Will mommy be

happy?”) Child: Yes (score = 0)

Comment: The child takes the puppet’s answer literaly.

Two independent raters coded children’s responses. The Cohen’s k value was .90, indicating

almost perfect agreement (Landis & Koch, 1977).

The Appendix displays some other examples of children's answers, and scoring.

Theory of mind tasks.

The theory of mind tasks were coded on the basis of the coding procedures normally used in

the literature. In more detail, in the Smarties task children’s answers were coded as correct if they

replied “Pringles!”, showing to appreciate the mental state of the person involved in the task

(Perner, Wimmer, & Leekam, 1987). In the Sally-Ann task an error in ToM is revealed at the belief

question if the child answers the wrong location of the ball (i.e., the box), since Sally is unaware of

Ann’s covert action (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). To pass the task and obtain 1 point at the belief

question, the children had to pass all the questions posed (naming, reality, and memory questions;


Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985). In the Ice-cream van story task children obtained 1 point if

they passed test question and if they correctly answered to the control questions, following the

procedure reported in Wimmer and Perner (1983).

To summarize, for each task a single score was given for children’s responses (0–1). Also in

this case, the responses of all participants on every theory of mind task were coded by two

independent judges; inter-rater agreement was almost perfect (Cohen’s k = .94).

Analysis and Results

1) Comparison between irony scenarios

First, children’s scores across irony scenarios and age groups were compared to determine

whether there was a difference among the tasks, and whether the ability to understand different

types of irony was characterized by an age-related improvement. Table 2 displays the mean

proportions of correct responses for the four types of scenarios (control, joke, contingent irony, and

background irony stories) in the four age groups and in the whole sample.

- Table 2 about here -

To test the hypothesis that different tasks would show increasing difficulty levels, we

performed a repeated measures ANOVA on the whole sample (see the bottom line of Table 2). A

linear contrast was fitted to the data under the hypothesis that task difficulty would be ordered as

follows: control stories < jokes < contingent irony < background irony. The analysis showed a

significant effect of task difficulty in the predicted direction (F(1, 99) = 255.37, p < .001, η2 = .72).

The effect of age on children’s performance was investigated with a between-subject

ANOVA with four levels corresponding to the four age groups, and average performance across

tasks as the dependent variable (rightmost column of Table 2). A linear contrast was fitted to the

data under the hypothesis that performance would increase linearly with age. Again, age showed a


significant effect on performance in the predicted direction (F(1, 98) =31.02, p < .001, η2 = .24),

indicating that children’s performance significantly increased with increasing age (Figure 1).

– Figure 1 about here –

2) Correlations between irony, language, and ToM scores

First, in order to investigate the relation between children’s ToM development and their

understanding of irony, correlational analyses were performed. Children’s scores on the various

ToM measures (Sally & Ann, Smarties’ task, and Ice-cream story) were correlated with

understanding of irony tasks (control, joke, contingent irony, and background irony). Table 3

presents the descriptive statistics for each ToM task in the sample. Table 4 displays correlations

among ToM tasks and irony comprehension.



Statistically significant correlations were found among the ToM tasks (.31 < r < .35; p < .01),

as well as among the irony tasks, namely joke, contingent irony, and background irony (.23 < r <

.46; p < .05). No significant correlations were observed between control stories and ToM tasks (-.14

< r < -.03; p > .05), and with irony stories (-.12 < r < .05; p > .05). For this reason, in the following

analysis we collapsed the three ToM tasks into a single ToM score, and the three pragmatic tasks

(joke, contingent irony and background irony) into a single humor comprehension score, while the

control stories were excluded. While the three pragmatic tasks are conceptually distinct, collapsing

them into a single score provides a more statistically robust measure of overall pragmatic ability

(Cronbach’s α = .73), as well as more robust estimates of path coefficients. Indeed, running


separate analyses for each task (humor, contingent irony, and background irony) yielded virtually

identical patterns of results, supporting the decision to employ the summary score in the main

analysis.

In order to examine what factors contribute to success in irony comprehension, the global

humor comprehension score was then correlated with children’s performance on PPVT-R (language

test), the global ToM score, chronological age, and sex. Table 5 shows correlations among these

variables.


The humor score was significantly correlated with the ToM score (r = .37, p < .0001), with

the PPVT-R score (r = .56, p < .0001), and with children’s age (r = .54, p < .0001); no significant

correlations were found with the sex of participants. While this pattern of correlations could imply

a causal effects of both ToM and language abilities on humor comprehension, the interpretation of

these findings is complicated by the correlation between ToM and language, and—even more

importantly—between all the performance variables and chronological age. On the one hand,

individual differences in language abilities might determine a spurious correlation between ToM

and humor comprehension. On the other hand, the whole pattern of correlations might be explained

by age differences between children. In order to disentangle these possibilities and ascertain the

specific effects of ToM and language on humor comprehension, we fitted a series of path analysis

models to the data and employed formal model selection techniques to choose the most appropriate

among them.

3) Path analysis: Effects of ToM, language abilities, and age on humor comprehension

To begin with, a set of four alternative path-analytic models (models A-D in Figure 2) was

constructed based on theoretical considerations. In these models, various combinations of age,


ToM, and language ability (PPVT-R) predicted humor comprehension, either directly or indirectly.

In all models, age had direct causal effects on language, ToM, and humor comprehension. In Model

A, both language and ToM had direct effects on humor comprehension; moreover, language had a

direct effect on ToM (and thus an additional indirect effect on humor comprehension). Model B was

the same as model A without the effect of language on ToM. In Model C, only ToM had a direct

effect on humor comprehension, while language had only an indirect effect through ToM. Finally,

in Model D, language ability affected both humor comprehension and ToM, and ToM had no

independent causal effect on humor comprehension.

- Figure 2 about here -

Models were fitted to the covariance matrix using maximum-likelihood estimation, and

compared using the small-sample version of Akaike’s AIC (AICC; see Burnham & Anderson,

2002). Models were fit with with R 2.8.0 (R Development Core Team, 2008) with the sem package

version 3.0 (Fox, 2008). Fit indices are shown in Figure 2. Model D achieved the best combination

of fit and parsimony, as shown by the lowest value of AICC, and was therefore selected as the best

model in the set. In order to test the possible effects of children’s sex, direct effects of sex on ToM,

language, and humor comprehension were added to model D, leading to model E (Figure 2). Model

E failed to outperform model D, and sex was consequently dropped from the analysis. The

standardized parameters of model D are shown in Figure 3.

- Figure 3 about here -

As expected, age significantly predicted both language ability and ToM skills, while the direct

effect of age on humor comprehension was not significant. Language had simultaneous effects on

humor comprehension and ToM performance; however, ToM had no independent effect on humor


comprehension. In other words, in the selected model the correlation between ToM and humor

understanding (see Table 5) was entirely spurious. Specifically, this correlation was accounted for

by (a) the shared direct effects of language ability on ToM and humor, and (b) the shared indirect

effects of chronological age on language and ToM.

Discussion

The current study was designed to investigate the emergence of humor and irony

comprehension in young children. Our goal was to examine the possibility of an early competence

and a progressive increment already during the preschool period; moreover, we tried to clarify the

role played by theory of mind and language skills in children’s acquisition of these communicative

acts.

A number of experimental studies have shown that irony is a communicative phenomenon

that is difficult to grasp. The observation of real life situations seems to contradict this fact: is it true

that when a mother tells her child coming back dirty from the playroom “Here you are, ready for a

visit to your grandmother!” the child does not understand the real meaning intended by the mother?

A mother who utters such an utterance implies shared knowledge about a familiar situation for the

child, being washed and changed clothes before a visit to grandmother. The general purpose of our

study was to investigate whether the difficulty that many children displayed in experimental

situations might be ascribed to the fact that children were asked to judge communicative acts and to

make the comprehension of their ironic nature explicit. Actually, it has been shown that even adults

may well understand the communicative intent of irony without taking notice of the specific ironic

form used (Gibbs, 1986). We can then consider that this be true also for children. Understanding

what is meant by ironic utterances should be assessed without asking children explicit judgments,

which by definition imply second-order theory of mind abilities.

For that reason we designed a task in which children had to show their comprehension of the

communicative intent of ironic utterances—i.e., what the speaker meant—by answering open-ended


questions related to natural communicative contexts. We assumed that adopting such a flexible

approach children would be able to demonstrate their emergent irony understanding. Moreover, as

irony can be considered as a form of humor, we associated irony comprehension to simple joke

situations.

Children were required to deal with communicative situations that are rather common in

parent/children and peers interactions. These situations covered different forms of humor, including

jokes and two forms of irony, and some everyday serious interactions used as control items. We

considered that the knowledge necessary for the comprehension of these situations could be

assumed with a reasonable probability. We expected that under these conditions the task would be

accessible also to young children, and that at least some of them would have been able to

understand the communicative intent even in the case of ironic utterances.

In the present study, the performance of children in all age groups in jokes did not differ

significantly from the performance in control situations. As regards the comprehension of irony we

found an increasing trend of performance with children’s age; as expected the immediate access to

shared knowledge on which irony is based makes the understanding of contingent irony easier than

the understanding of background irony. From our point of view, the most interesting result regards

irony understanding in the younger groups of children. In fact also the 3- and 4-year-olds showed a

good performance in the contingent irony tasks (.64 and .75, respectively) and a reasonable

comprehension of background irony (.45 and .55 respectively). Thus our results showed that even

3- and 4-year-old children might comprehend the actual intent of an ironic communicative act. An

interesting element is that our data show an important individual variability with regards

particularly to the younger groups. It is in these groups that we find children who gave correct

answers to all the items and others who never showed comprehension. Different studies on the

development of humor have shown a high degree of variability within groups of children

(Brodzinsky & Righmyer, 1980; Masten, 1989; St James & Tager-Flusberg, 1994; Varga, 2000).

Moreover, this is consistent with the Finnish study (Loukusa & Leinonen, 2008) that noted the same


effect in children aged 3 to 6, an effect that the authors related with a different use of irony in home

environment. This is also consistent with our hypothesis that comprehension of irony is not

dependent on the ability of making inferences on the other’s mind, but on the familiarity with these

specific forms of communicative interactions. While ToM abilities show a certain degree of

individual variability, they also increase strongly with age. On the contrary, as Recchia and

colleagues (2010) have found, there is a great deal of variability across families in their use of ironic

language. As these authors suggest to have new insight on this correlation future research should

combine children’s observation in family context and experimental assessment.

Our results show that it is useful posing the distinction between the comprehension of the

communicative intent of an ironic utterance and understanding of the ironic form. The fact that

there are two different steps in irony comprehension has been proposed in the literature (Ackerman,

1983; Hancock, Dunham & Purdy, 2000) attributing these two steps to different levels of ToM

abilities. Our point of view is more radical. Children are involved since very young in

communicative interactions, which imply shared knowledge (Airenti, 2010). It is on the background

of this familiar knowledge that children may have direct access to the speaker’s communicative

intent without elaborating the specific literal phrasing. In fact people in general, even adults in

everyday communicative interactions just limit to comprehend the “real meaning” of a

communicative act, which often is not the literal meaning. Adults are more proficient with respect

to children because in case of failure or uncertainty they may resort to more complex inferences

while this is not the case for young children. Our approach is compatible with those studies that

have shown that young children are able to grasp the communicative intentions of their interlocutors

while have difficulties to take account of the specific linguistic form that it has been used to convey

them (Olson & Hildyard, 1981; Robinson, Goelman & Olson, 1983). It has been suggested that the

capacity of distinguishing literal meaning from communicative intent is a general ability that

develops between first and second grade (Beal & Flavell, 1984).


In the literature about irony this issue has been summarized as the contrast between one stage

and two stage theories (Attardo, 2000). On this matter a debate has opposed Gibbs (1984) who has

contended that the comprehension of the real meaning is immediate and does not pass through the

failure of the literal meaning and other authors assuming that there are reasons to think that speakers

have access also to the literal meaning (Dews & Winner, 1995; Giora, 1997). Recently this debate

has been resumed by Gibbs and Colston (2012) who argue against a principled distinction between

literal and nonliteral language and maintain that figurative language does not represent any

cognitive deviation. Actually, this is a general question regarding the link between language and

communication. A great part of human communication is not literal and it is a fact that adults deal

with it rather easily. Surely, there are cases where the doubt arises if an utterance has to be taken for

instance as a literal praise or as an ironic blame. What can make the doubt arise is a lack of shared

knowledge. Think of someone saying “Paul is so brilliant!”. The interlocutor may not be sure

about the knowledge and judgments possibly shared with the speaker and so being unable to decide

if the utterance has to be taken as ironic or not. If the interlocutor on the contrary shares with the

speaker a negative judgment about Paul the ironic interpretation is immediately activated as the

literal one would be in the case they shared a positive judgment. Thus, questioning about the kind of

utterance produced by the speaker, literal or nonliteral, is linked to a failure of interpreting it on the

background of shared knowledge (Airenti, Bara, & Colombetti, 1993). In conclusion,

comprehension does not require fully developed ToM abilities, while producing judgments on

communicative acts is a ToM task. In the comprehension of the communicative intent children, like

adults, rely on other factors such as their familiarity with the situation and the accessibility of the

knowledge which constitutes the background of the communicative act. This last aspect is

particularly relevant for irony comprehension, as shared knowledge is the only element leading

toward the nonliteral interpretation. In addition, children are able to coordinate multiple cues in

order to interpret ironic utterance, including the literal statement itself, the speaker’s personality,

and the type of statement, from very early (Climie & Pexman, 2008). The variability of results


especially among the younger children can be considered as supporting this point of view. We

found the same variability in a study of ours presently in preparation in which we have used parent

reports to give account of 2- to 7- year-old children’s production of jokes, contingent irony and

background irony. Also in this case variability and a notable precocity in dealing with irony shown

by some of the children were associated.

The theoretical perspective and the experimental design that we have adopted—choosing to

include in the same study both jokes and irony tasks—takes a stand on the relation between irony

and humor more in general. We believe that there is a strong link between these two phenomena.

In fact in the developmental literature such a link has been formulated mainly in terms of irony

components, ascertaining the capacity to single out the humorous component of irony. Dews and

colleagues (1996) and Harris and Pexman (2003) showed that children appreciate rather late the

humorous aspect of irony, while Filippova and Astington (2010) found that even adults did not find

irony particularly funny under the same experimental conditions. Our results showed that if the

problem is posed in terms of the comprehension of the communicative intent even young children

could comprehend that the incongruity of an ironic utterance is intended for fun. This does not

entail that they find ironic utterances funny. As we mentioned in the introduction irony as humor in

general has always a latent component of aggressiveness. Thus the perception of fun in humor

depends on which side one is in real situations (the humorist or the victim) or with which character

one identifies in stories, as it has been shown by Pexman and colleagues (2005). Here we enter a

very interesting field which goes beyond the simple comprehension of communicative acts and

which surely deserves further work.

A fundamental point we intended to tackle in our study concerned the relations among theory

of mind abilities, language skills, and irony understanding, an issue that has received much attention

in the current literature (Milligan, Astington, & Dack, 2007). From the present study, both

language and ToM skills positively correlated with irony understanding; while this picture could be

consistent with a causal effect of both cognitive abilities on irony understanding, its interpretation is


complicated by the fact that language and ToM skills are correlated to each other, and that both are

related to the chronological age. Our analyses suggested that the correlation between irony

understanding and ToM was spurious, accounted by the shared effects of language ability on ToM

and irony, and by the shared indirect effects of children’s age on language and ToM. This finding

indicates that simple correlations between ToM, language ability, and irony understanding should

be interpreted with considerable caution, since at least some of the effects may be partially or

entirely spurious. In order to avoid misleading interpretations of research findings, explicit causal

models should be constructed and tested; in particular, the independent effects of ToM and

language should be assessed after controlling for their statistical overlap and for the indirect effects

of chronological age.

Although the ToM abilities in our study seem to play a minor role, these findings are in line

with those by Filippova and Astington (2008) with respect to language development, and with those

of several other studies in showing the important role of language in the acquisition of theory of

mind (see for instance, Dunn & Brophy, 2005; Dunn, Brown, Slomkowski, Tesla & Youngblade,

1991; Nelson, 2005; Nelson et al., 2003; Ruffman, Slade & Crowe, 2002). Considering that the

most relevant aspect in irony understanding is the access to shared knowledge, we can interpret this

result considering that linguistic proficiency allows a more active role in communicative

interactions thus facilitating the acquisition of knowledge necessary to comprehension. In

conclusion, we can argue that when actively involved in communication even young children may

implicitly understand the communicative intentions of their interlocutors, before they acquire

complete ToM skills, as measured by the well-known ToM tasks.

In the present study we introduced a distinction between irony based on directly perceived

information and irony based on shared knowledge. While our findings support the usefulness of this

dichotomy, we intend it as a heuristic device rather than an exhaustive taxonomy of ironic acts and

we expect that future research in this area will reveal other useful distinctions between related forms

of humorous communication.


In our experimental procedure, children were not asked to provide explicit judgments on the

nature of the communicative acts they observed. Clearly, a limitation of this approach is that we

cannot know exactly how children interpreted those acts. It could be that more specific questions

would elicit more explicit information about the nature of children’s intepretations. However, our

procedure was chosen to be as close as possible to real-life situations, in which children are rarely if

ever asked to precisely explicate their understanding of a humorous event or interaction

The novel contribution of the present study is that we were able to document young children’s

ability to deal with irony, by distinguishing between the ability to comprehend the speaker’s

meaning in communicative contexts from the ability to give explicit judgments on the nature of

his/her utterances. By focusing on the former, we can begin to explain why young children appear

way more proficient in real life than they do in most experimental settings.

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Acknowledgment. This research was supported by PRIN Project 2008 (No. 2008N9KF5K)

from Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca (MIUR). The authors would like to

thank Valentina Berti, Miryam Donzelli, Andrea Dulicchio, and Marika Tigani for their

contribution in data collecting and coding, and dr. Marco Del Giudice for his valuable advice on the

statistical analysis of the results.


Table 1

Sample Description: Demographic Details and Peabody Scores of Participants

Age group No. of

children

Sex Age (years) Peabody score

Female Male M SD M SD

3-yr-olds 25 12 13 3.34 .17 38.20 9.65 4-yr-olds 25 13 12 4.25 .15 55.56 13.71

5-yr-olds 25 13 12 5.19 .32 80.88 19.16 6-yr-olds 25 12 13 6.32 .24 95.48 18.93

Total 100 50 50 Mean 4.77 .22 67.53 15.36


Table 2

Mean (SD) of Correct Responses to the Different Types of Scenarios (Scoring Range 0-1)

Age group Control stories Joke

Contingent irony

Background irony

Average score

3-yr-olds .97 (.08) .85 (.24) .57 (.33) .40 (.26) .70 (.16)

4-yr-olds 1.00 (.00) .87 (.21) .71 (.30) .52 (.25) .77 (.12)

5-yr-olds 1.00 (.00) 1.00 (.00) .87 (.22) .60 (.24) .87 (.09)

6-yr-olds .95 (.12) .97 (.09) .92 (.14) .63 (.23) .86 (.09)

Whole sample .98 (.08) .92 (.17) .77 (.29) .54 (.26) .80 (.14)


Table 3

Mean (SD) of Correct Responses to the Theory of Mind Tasks (Scoring Range 0-1)

Age group Sally & Ann Smarties' task Ice-cream story Total

3-yr-olds .08 (.28) .20 (.41) .00 (.00) .09 .15 4-yr-olds .40 (.50) .25 (.44) .04 (.20) .25 .29

5-yr-olds .64 (.49) .63 (.49) .28 (.46) .51 .33 6-yr-olds .84 (.37) .72 (.46) .36 (.49) .64 .30

Mean .49 (.50) .45 (.50) .17 (.38) .37 (.35)


Table 4

Correlations between Irony and ToM Scores (Global Sample)

Variables 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1. Sally & Ann —

2. Smarties' task .35** —

3. Ice-cream story .31** .34** —

4. Control stories -.07 -.03 -.14 —

5. Joke .14 .23* .12 -.12 —

6. Contingent irony .34** .32** .21* -.01 .24* —

7. Background irony .15 .27** .11 .05 .23* .46** —

* p < .05, ** p < .01


Table 5

Correlations of Irony Score, ToM Score, Peabody Score, Age, and Sex (Global Sample)

Variables 1 2 3 4 5

1. Irony score —

2. ToM score .37** —

3. PPVT-R .56** .61** —

4. Age .54** .62** .81** —

5. Sex .10 .05 .01 .01 —

* p < .05, ** p < .01


Figure 1. Children's performance on the control, joke, contingent, and background irony stories by age group.

1

0.9

0.8

0.7

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

6-yrs 5-yrs

4-yrs

3-yrs

Joke Control stories

Contingent irony

Background irony


Figure 2. Potential models among age, language skills, ToM ability, and irony comprehension.


Figure 3. Standardized parameters of model D (see Figure 2). Variances, disturbances, and measurement errors are omitted fro clarity of presentation.

.81* (p < .001) .36* (p = .011)

.31* (p = .02)

.38* (p = .004)

.24 (p = .083)


Appendix

Samples of Stimuli, Test Questions, Children's Answers, and Scoring

Irony task Samples of Item Test question Samples of children's

answer Scoring

Control stories

Item #1 The puppet A is playing ball. The puppet B says: "I like too play ball!"

Why did the puppet B1 say that? Optional questions: • If the child simply

repeats the same utterance: Is it true that he likes to play ball?

A21 (3.0)2 "I don’t know"

0 point

A22 (3.5) "Because he wants to make fun of her”

0 point

Joke

Item #5 The puppets are laughing while looking at someone who is falling down. The puppet B says: “Look! He has fallen down!”

Why did the puppet B1 say that? Optional questions: • If the child simply

repeats the same utterance: And so what are they doing?

• If the child replies “Laughing”: So, why are they laughing?

A24 (3.0) “Because they are laughing.”

0 point

A25 (3.0) “He said that because it is so fun.”

1 point

A23 (2.7) “Because they don’t have to do that

0 point

Contingent irony

Item #11 The puppets are playing blocks. Puppet A strikes down the construction.

Why did puppet B1

say that? Optional questions: • If the child simply

A25 (3.10 ) “Because he has broken it” (Examiner: Was it a good move?) “No”

1 point

1 The examiner points to the puppet B while asking children to give answers. 2 Child ID number, and chronological age in parentheses.


Puppet B says: “Good move!”

repeats the same utterance: Is it true that it was a good move?”

C60 (5.0) “I don’t know, normally you don’t say that”

0 point

B43 (4.3) “Because she wants to play too”

0 point

Background irony

Item #15 The puppets are fighting over a toy. The mum arrives, takes the toy away, and says: “Have fun!”

Why did the mum say that? Optional questions: • If the child simply

repeats the same utterance: Is it true that the mum wants that they have fun?”

B42 (4.0) “Because she is angry” (Examiner: Is it true that the mum wants they have fun?) “No.”

1 point

C61 (4.11) “Because she wants that they play together”

0 point

The Development of Joke and Irony Understanding: A Study with 3- to 6-year-old Children

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