The Developmental Puzzle of Irony Understanding: Is Epistemic Vigilance the Missing Piece?
The prolonged developmental window of irony understanding opens up the question of which socio-cognitive repertoire underlies this pragmatic capacity. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between epistemic vigilance and irony understanding in 5/6- and 6/7-year-old children using a...
| Publicado en: | Journal of Child Language Vol. 53; no. 3; pp. 684 - 706 |
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| Autores principales: | , , , |
| Formato: | pictorial research tables/charts Journal Article |
| Publicado: |
Cambridge University Press
May2026
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=193761222&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 193761222 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 03050009 JCL jtl: Journal of Child Language issn: 03050009 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: May2026 vid: 53 iid: 3 pid: 15979 pub: Cambridge University Press artinfo: ui: 193761222 193761222 193761222 10.1017/S0305000925000091 193761222 ppf: 684 ppct: 22 formats: tig: atl: The Developmental Puzzle of Irony Understanding: Is Epistemic Vigilance the Missing Piece? aug: au: Milosavljevic, Ana Castelain, Thomas Pouscoulous, Nausicaa Mazzarella, Diana affil: Cognitive Science Centre, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland sug: subj: Figurative Language Child Development Epistemology Readability Trust Task Performance and Analysis Switzerland Human Funding Source Female Male Child, Preschool Child Adult Schools, Elementary Games Prediction Models Language Development Reliability Experimental Studies Data Analysis Software Nonparametric Statistics Parametric Statistics Chi Square Test Descriptive Statistics Comparative Studies Descriptive Research Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test Mann-Whitney U Test T-Tests Post Hoc Analysis Child, Preschool: 2-5 years Child: 6-12 years Adult: 19-44 years Female Male ab: The prolonged developmental window of irony understanding opens up the question of which socio-cognitive repertoire underlies this pragmatic capacity. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between epistemic vigilance and irony understanding in 5/6- and 6/7-year-old children using a picture selection task. We assessed children's vigilance towards unreliable informants and manipulated the reliability of the irony target. Our findings confirm that irony comprehension is a late-emerging skill and highlight the need to differentiate its full-fledged understanding from mere sensitivity to contextual mismatches. While irony understanding was not affected by our reliability manipulation, our findings revealed that more vigilant children were better at irony understanding than less vigilant ones. This provides the first empirical evidence that epistemic vigilance is a good predictor of irony performance and lays the ground for future research on the intricate relationship between these two capacities. Résumé: La fenêtre développementale prolongée de la compréhension de l'ironie soulève la question du répertoire socio-cognitif sous-jacent à cette capacité pragmatique. Dans cette étude, nous examinons la relation entre vigilance épistémique et compréhension de l'ironie chez des enfants de 5/6 et 6/7 ans à l'aide d'une tâche de sélection d'images. Nous évaluons la vigilance des enfants envers des informateurs peu fiables et manipulons la fiabilité de la cible ironique. Nos résultats confirment que la compréhension de l'ironie est une compétence qui émerge tardivement et soulignent la nécessité de distinguer une réelle compréhension de l'ironie d'une simple sensibilité aux discordances contextuelles. Nos résultats n'indiquent pas que la compréhension des énoncés ironiques par les enfants ait été affectée par notre manipulation de la fiabilité de l'informateur, ils suggèrent néanmoins que les enfants les plus vigilants comprennent mieux l'ironie que ceux qui sont moins vigilants. Il s'agit là d'une première preuve empirique indiquant que la vigilance épistémique est un bon prédicteur de la capacité à saisir l'ironie chez l'enfant, qui ouvre la voie à de futures recherches sur la relation complexe entre ces deux capacités. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: pictorial research tables/charts Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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