In order to understand most, if not any communicative act, the listener needs to make inferences about what the speaker intends to convey. This perspective-taking process is especially challenging in the case of non-literal uses of language such as verbal irony (e.g., “Thanks for your help!” uttered to someone who has not provided the expected support). Children have been shown to have difficulties with the comprehension of irony well into the school years, but the factors that hamper or facilitate children’s perspective-taking in irony comprehension are not well understood. This study takes as its starting point the relevance-theoretic echoic analysis of verbal irony (Wilson & Sperber, 2012), and focuses on two of irony’s distinctive features as defined by this theory: (i) the normative bias, and (ii) the characteristic tone of voice. In this study we investigated the comprehension of irony in children aged 3-8 years. We manipulated these two factors, including the violation of different types of norms and the use of different tones of voice – to see how they affected children’s processing and interpretation of irony. Using an irony comprehension task which combined picture selection and eye-tracking, we found that the type of norm violation affected 4-5-year-olds’ offline understanding of irony, with a better performance on moral compared to social norm violations. Tone of voice had an effect on gaze behaviour in adults, but not children, although a parodic, pretence-oriented tone of voice tended to lead to more looks to the angry compared to the happy emoticon at the offset of the ironical utterance, potentially facilitating children’s irony understanding. Our results show that the understanding of irony can be detected on explicit measures around age 6 – with the emergence of second-order perspective-taking abilities – but that a sensitivity to some of irony’s features can be detected several years earlier. Finally, our study provides novel input to the debate on the existence of a so-called literal stage in pragmatic development, in particular regarding 3-year-olds’ differential performance on the offline and online measures of irony understanding, suggesting that they are not naively mistaking ironical utterances for ‘ordinary’ literal ones.

中文翻译：

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儿童的讽刺和观点分析：违反规范和语气的作用

为了理解大多数（即使不是任何交流行为），听众需要对讲话者打算传达的内容做出推论。对于非语言使用的语言（例如口头讽刺）（例如，向未提供预期支持的人说“谢谢您的帮助！”），这种观点收集过程尤其具有挑战性。事实表明，儿童在学年中很难理解反讽，但是对阻碍或促进儿童反讽理解的因素却知之甚少。这项研究以口头反讽的相关理论回声分析作为起点（Wilson＆Sperber，2012），并着重于该理论所定义的反讽的两个独特特征：（i）规范性偏见，和（ii）特色的语气。在这项研究中，我们调查了3-8岁儿童的反讽理解。我们操纵了这两个因素，包括违反不同类型的规范和使用不同的语音语调，以了解它们如何影响孩子对反讽的处理和解释。通过将图片选择和眼动追踪相结合的反讽理解任务，我们发现违反规范的类型影响了4-5岁儿童的离线反讽理解，与违反社会规范相比，道德上的表现更好。语音的语气对成年人的注视行为有影响，但对儿童的注视行为没有影响，尽管在讽刺的发声抵消后，与喜乐的表情符号相比，模仿和假装为导向的语音倾向于使愤怒的表情更多儿童的讽刺意味。我们的结果表明，对讽刺的理解可以在6岁左右通过显式量度得到检测-随着二阶观点获取能力的出现-但可以在几年前发现对某些反讽特征的敏感性。最后，我们的研究为务实发展中存在所谓的文字阶段的争论提供了新颖的输入，特别是关于三岁儿童在离线和在线反讽理解中的差异表现，表明他们并非天真地将讽刺性话语误认为是“普通”字面上的话。