The development of irony and epistemic vigilance

Understanding irony requires epistemic vigilance towards both the content and source of communication. We conducted two experiments to investigate whether children’s early epistemic vigilance abilities aid in detecting verbal irony. The first experiment focused on children’s vigilance towards utterance content, hypothesizing that utterances whose explicit (or literal) content is more inappropriate in the context would be easier to recognize as ironic. The second experiment examined children’s vigilance towards the source of the utterances, hypothesizing that children would find ironic (but literally accurate) informants more trustworthy than inaccurate ones. Both tasks proved challenging for 3- to 7-year-olds, providing no direct evidence of irony understanding. While adults performed as predicted in the first experiment, they did not trust ironic (but accurate) informants, suggesting that the trustworthiness paradigm may not suit the complexity of verbal irony, where the speaker is both dismissive and correct. Our results contribute to a better understanding of the role of epistemic vigilance in irony development.