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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. 140–160

Explaining children’s comprehension of verbal irony

ORCiD logo with link | University of Manitoba
 | University of Manitoba
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Several theories explain how adults understand verbal irony, but only a few have been generalized to explain children’s comprehension of verbal irony. In this narrative review paper, we identify cues to verbal irony (Theme 1), related cognitive skills (Theme 2), and social experience (Theme 3) as three main themes in the existing developmental verbal irony literature. Next, we review papers where researchers have directly tested theories with children to determine which theories have been generalized to explain these themes. This allows us to identify which research domains have received a theoretical interpretation, and which ones should be theoretically examined in future research. Based on our summary, we suggest that the Parallel Constraint Satisfaction (PCS) framework provides a promising verbal irony theory, and we identify directions for future research for testing the PCS framework.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Themes in developmental verbal irony research
  • 3.Verbal irony theories tested with children
    • 3.1Echoic mention theory
    • 3.2Allusional pretense theory
    • 3.3Cognitive pragmatics theory
    • 3.4Parallel constraint satisfaction framework
    • 3.5Interim summary
  • 4.Future directions and challenges for the PCS framework
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
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