Putting the pieces together
Subtitle: the development of children's interpretive judgment through irony.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 246
Subjects: Philosophy of mind in children.; Cognition in children.; Children -- Language.; Irony.
Description: This study investigated 6- to 10-year-olds' ability to understand situational irony, verbal irony, and each of these in the presence of the other. It was hypothesized that children interpret situational irony using cognitive event representations and they interpret verbal irony using metalinguistic representations. Further, in the interpretation of irony, event and metalinguistic processing are separate, event processing precedes the development of metalinguistic processing, and both are dependent upon an understanding of mental states.The verbal irony condition examined children's ability to interpret the speaker's meaning, the speaker's intention (why s/he said what s/he did), and the listener's appreciation of the speaker's meaning and intention. Children relied on cognitive event representations to interpret speaker's meaning until age 10. The more discrepant the event from the speaker's utterance, the greater the likelihood of younger children's understanding. Beginning at age 10, children were able to distinguish between speaker's meaning and the literal meaning of the utterance, using a metalinguistic process separate from the event representation. However, even at age 10, children were generally unable to interpret the listener's understanding of the speaker's meaning and intention.The situational irony condition investigated children's ability to interpret scripts/counter-scripts and changes in character's perspective. Results showed that the success of children's event processing depends upon the number and complexity of the components to be represented, and the complexity of the changes in perspective. More complex counter-scripts and more complex perspective changes are understood only by older children.Children's ability to interpret both situational irony and verbal irony declined in a third condition that combined the two types. These results are taken as support for the view that event and metalinguistic processing are separate, and that higher-order mental state understanding of perspective is different from metalinguistic intention processing. Interpretation based on event representations and changes in perspective dominate children's understanding until middle childhood. Further, event representation continues to develop as both the complexity of scripts/counter-scripts and changes in perspective place demands on children's ability to represent events mentally. Metalinguistic processing of linguistic intentions is later developing than event representation processing and is challenging for children even at age 10.
Notes: Adviser: Janet W. Astington.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-10, Section: B, page: 5441.