| This cross-sectional study investigates the development of advanced aspects of social reasoning in school-aged children. Discourse irony is used as the means to examine 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (N = 72) skill at interpreting different aspects of a speaker's mind (i.e., his or her meaning, belief, communicative intention, motivation, and attitude) and their understanding of the pragmatic function of irony. The inclusion of adults (N = 48) allows for comparison with adults' interpretation of irony.; The findings demonstrate age-related improvement in children's understanding of an ironist's mind. While 5-year-olds lag consistently behind the other age groups in their reasoning about the social-cognitive aspects of irony, adults are consistently superior to children of all ages on these measures. Two factors---whether irony is used to criticize or to praise, or the degree of familiarity of the story protagonists---do not have an effect on children's judgment of the speaker's mind. However, understanding the speaker's belief, intention, and motivation in counterfactual statements is superior to that in hyperbole.; An acquisition sequence of the individual aspects of theory of mind is revealed: First, children identify the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant. Subsequently, their understanding of the speaker's belief emerges followed by that of the speaker's communicative intention. It is not until an understanding of these aspects is present that children start to identify the speaker's attitude. Language competence, measured by a receptive vocabulary test, and advanced theory of mind, measured by justifications from advanced theory-of-mind tasks, contribute independently to children's interpretation of irony's social-cognitive measures over and above age, memory, and prosody. Children's attunement to prosody fails to predict children's understanding of an ironist's mind.; Finally, there are limited age-related differences in participants' judgment of how nice, how mean, and how funny irony is. Overall, irony is not judged positively. There is, however, a trend to regard irony as less mean with increasing age. Children are able to judge the pragmatic function of irony more easily than they can judge the socio-cognitive aspects of the ironist's mind. The results are discussed within the framework of both theory-of-mind and pragmatic theories. |
