Children's Use Of Trait Information In Understanging Verbal Irony Through Middle Childhood

Irony has always been the research focus of many subjects such as rhetoric, philosophy, linguistics and psychology. The research on children's understanding of verbal irony is useful to reveal many aspects of children's cognitive development.Former research indicates that children of 6 years old have been able to understand irony. Functions of irony include meanness, humor and politeness. However, these studies are all based on one form of irony that is counterfactual statement. Forms of irony are not merely counterfactual statement , but include many other forms such as true statement, rhetoric question, offering and thanks.Story reading which is most often used in previous research is used to examine whether providing information about a speaker's personality traits would influence 6 ,7, 8 years old children's interpretations and processing of verbal irony, as well as understanding of the meaning, response latencies and function of different forms . In Experiment 1 and 2, we examine the use of personality trait information separate from the comprehension of verbal irony in 6-to 8-year-olds, the results demonstrated strong understanging of personality traits and limited understanding of verbal irony. In Experiment 3, children were provided with trait information about the speaker, results showed that children's interpretations of irony were modulated by speaker personality traits and older children were more efficient than younger children at coordinating cues to verbal irony. The results also indicate that children of different years old differ in their sensitivities to different forms of irony, but counterfactual is the worst understood through all groups. The developmental trend of reponse latencies to questions about the speaker's intent is the same as the understanding of the meaning. Children's ability to perceive the meanness of irony improves gradually as the age accreted, and displays a trend of tinging under the personality traits. Children's perception of humor of irony doesn't appear notable, but improve in Experiment 3. The perception of politeness of irony is the same, it is higher with personality traits than without personality traits. On the whole, understanding of the meaning, response latencies and function of different forms were modulated by speaker personality traits.