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Article In: Investigating Children’s Irony Comprehension: Current trends, challenges, and perspectives
Edited by Julia Fuchs-Kreiß
[Pragmatics & Cognition 33:1] 2026
► pp. 34–55

LEIRO

A novel approach to assess irony comprehension in children

 | Leipzig University
 | Leipzig University
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Irony comprehension is a complex pragmatic skill developing late in childhood, with inconsistent findings regarding the acquisition age. One reason for this inconsistency could be that previous studies focused on different components of irony comprehension (e.g., speaker belief, emotion, meaning, intent), relied on metapragmatic questions, or used offline measures. Building on recent methods combining offline tasks with eye-tracking, we developed LEIRO, a tool for testing irony comprehension in children aged 3 and older. LEIRO presents vignette stories, requiring children to select objects based on target utterances, while eye-tracking and pupillometry measure implicit comprehension. A pilot study with German-speaking 7-year-olds (n = 15) and adults (n = 13), conducted primarily to test the method in practice, showed only limited irony comprehension in children compared to adults. LEIRO will be made available for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies to advance the research on, and thus our understanding of, the development of irony comprehension.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Children’s irony comprehension as a puzzle for theories of pragmatic development
    • 2.1Previous approaches and potential reasons for diverging findings
      • 2.1.1The ‘component approach’
      • 2.1.2Methodological problems
    • 2.2Novel approaches and innovative research designs
  • 3.LEIRO: The Leipzig kit for testing irony comprehension
    • 3.1Objectives
    • 3.2Design
      • 3.2.1Construction of the trials
      • 3.2.2Conditions and counterbalancing
      • 3.2.3Operationalization
        • Explicit comprehension: Object choice
        • Implicit comprehension: Eye-tracking and pupillometry
      • 3.2.4Target age groups and stimuli construction
    • 3.3Pilot study
      • 3.3.1Participants and procedure
      • 3.3.2Data handling
      • 3.3.3Results and discussion
        • Explicit comprehension (object choice)
        • Implicit comprehension (eye-tracking and pupillometry)
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Authors’ contribution
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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