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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. 75–98

The development of irony and epistemic vigilance

Content inappropriateness and speaker trustworthiness

ORCiD logo with link | University of Oslo
ORCiD logo with link | University of Oslo
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Irony and epistemic vigilance
    • 1.2The current study
  • 2.Experiment 1: Irony and inappropriateness
    • 2.1Method
      • 2.1.1Experimental design
      • 2.1.2Participants
    • 2.2Results
      • 2.2.1Accuracy of picture selection
      • 2.2.2Looks to pictures
      • 2.2.3Looks to speaker
    • 2.3Discussion
  • 3.Experiment 2: Irony and trustworthiness
    • 3.1Method
      • 3.1.1Experimental design
      • 3.1.2Participants
    • 3.2Results
      • 3.2.1Choice of puppet
      • 3.2.2Choice of object name
    • 3.3Discussion
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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