The Development of Mandarin-Speaking Children’s Comprehension of Irony

This study examined age-related differences in irony comprehension among 168 Mandarin-speaking children aged 6–10 years. Each child watched four illustrated stories with prerecorded audio: one literal, one deception, and two irony stories. For each irony story, children judged the speaker’s satisfaction, identified praise or criticism, and explained the remark. Their answers were then classified into four ordered performance levels. Age-group and irony-condition effects were tested with a generalized ordinal GEE clustered by child, and explanation errors were examined descriptively. Performance differed significantly by age group but not by irony condition. Six-year-olds identified the speaker’s dissatisfaction and intended criticism in 40.4% of their classifiable story responses, compared with 83.3% among 10-year-olds. Yet only about two in five responses from 10-year-olds included a correct or near-correct explanation. Children who misjudged both attitude and meaning usually understood the remark literally and treated it as sincere. When children recognized dissatisfaction and criticism but could not explain the irony, most responses contained no relevant explanation, while some explained the remark as an attempt to conceal dissatisfaction or avoid direct criticism. Together, these findings show age-related differences in recognizing ironic criticism and in performance on the explanation task. They also suggest that some awareness of the speaker’s strategy may be present before children can explain irony adequately.