Are Children Sensitive to Ironic Prosody? A Novel Task to Settle the Issue

Ironic remarks are often pronounced with a distinctive intonation. It is not clear whether children rely on acoustic cues to attribute an ironic intent. This question has been only indirectly tackled, with studies that manipulated the intonation with which the final remark is pronounced within an irony comprehension task. We propose a new task that is meant to assess whether children rely on prosody to infer speakers’ sincere or ironic communicative intentions, without requiring meta-linguistic judgments (since pragmatic awareness is challenging for young children). Children listen to evaluative remarks (e.g., “That house is really beautiful”), pronounced with sincere or ironic intonation, and they are asked to identify what the speaker is referring to by selecting one of two pictures depicting an image corresponding to a literal interpretation (a luxury house) and one to its reverse interpretation (a hovel). We tested eighty children aged 3 to 11 years and found a clear developmental trend, with children consistently responding above the chance level from age seven, and there was no correlation with the recognition of emotions transmitted through the vocal channel.