A Psychological Research On Chinese Children's Understanding Of Irony

By means of a series of experiments, the present study investigated the developmental trends, mental mechanisms and effective factors in Chinese children's understanding of irony. The study consists of four parts. The first part examined the developmental trends and mistake types in 6-to 10-year-olds' understanding of irony. The second part investigated the cognition and developmental trends of the social function of irony in 6-to 10-year-olds'. The third part explored the mental mechanisms in 6-to 10-year-olds' understanding of irony from second-order theory of mind and executive function perspective. The four part examined the effects of intonation, types of others' expectancy and linguistic training on the understanding of irony in 6-to 10-year- olds' and their mental mechanisms. The results showed: (1) The children displayed developmental unbalance in different aspects of irony cognition. 6-year-olds have possessed tentative irony cognitive ability, they began to understand the attitudes and the discourse meanings of the speakers, but they could not explain irony phenomenon correctly. Untill 10-year-old, the ability of children's interpretation of irony phenomenon were still developing. (2) The main type of mistake in 6-to 10-year-olds' understanding of irony was the tendency to interpret irony as "sincere speech" . The lower the children's understanding level was, the higher the proportion of this mistake type was. The higher the children's understanding level was, the higher the proportion of "lying(or deception)" mistake was. (3) The children displayed developmental unbalance in different aspects of social function cognition of irony. 6-year-olds began to recognize the muting function of ironic criticism and ironic compliment. 8-year-olds began to recognize the humor function of ironic compliment. Untill 10-year-old, the children's recognition ability of humor function of ironic...