Abstract
In this thesis I examined the process of irony appreciation across middle childhood with three goals: 1) to identify potential speaker cues that are useful for irony interpretation, 2) to ascertain developmental trends in processing that relate to the integration of these speaker cues, and 3) to determine whether children exhibited evidence of interactive processing. Two experiments were conducted in which 5- to- 6-year-old children, 7- to- 8-year-old children, and adults viewed puppet shows in which a speaker cue was manipulated. The puppet shows ended in a literal or ironic statement and measurements of participants’ behavioral and processing responses were recorded.
In Experiment 1 the speaker cue manipulated was sibling relationship status; the speaker and target in the story were either siblings or had just met. Adults and children both showed a trend in their response latencies to respond more quickly when a sibling made an ironic criticism than when a stranger did. However, this finding was not robust. In Experiment 2 the speaker cue manipulated was the speaker’s perceived similarity to the participant. The participant identified a speaker that was similar to them, and one who was dissimilar to them; each of these two speakers were used in half of the stories the participants heard. The results of this experiment showed that adults benefited from the presence of a similar speaker in some aspects of irony interpretation, but children did not. Across both experiments, evidence from eye gaze patterns supported interpretations that are consistent with interactive processing accounts of irony. Implications for the use of speaker cues in irony understanding and the interpretation of results within modular versus interactive processing accounts are discussed.
