Young children’s understanding of the speaker’s belief, attitude and intention in verbal irony and deception
-
1
Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Department of Cognitive Science, Hungary
The study explores the development of irony comprehension in children and its relationship with some aspects of Theory of Mind. Irony comprehension develops remarkably slowly in children even compared to some other pragmatic skills. Studies on irony comprehension that use simple tasks asking children to decide whether a statement in a story is true, a joke or a lie suggest that the most common error five to seven year olds make is the misinterpretation of irony as an act of deception, which suggests that children may understand that ironic utterances are literally false but are uncertain about the speaker’s intentions. To confirm this conclusion, tasks were developed with three components of irony separated: the speaker’s belief about the state of affairs, the speaker’s intentions when uttering the statement and the speaker’s attitude towards the situation. Using such a design, we show that young children have difficulty interpreting not only the speaker’s intentions and attitudes but also their beliefs.
Ninety-one typically developing Hungarian children participated in the experiment 30 five year-olds, 32 seven year-olds and 29 ten year-olds group. An investigator read out short stories that ended with one of the characters in the story uttering a statement. The statements were ironic, literally true or lies. After each story, the children were asked to answer three questions. The question-and-answer design was a modified version of the one used in Harris and Pexman (2003) and Pexman & Glenwright (2006). There was a belief question with a choice of two answers (When Mom said the room was nice and tidy, did she think that the room was nice and tidy or that the room was not nice and tidy?), an intention question with a choice of three answers represented by smiley-type faces (Show me the face that shows whether Mom was joking, meant what she said or wanted to deceive Johnny when she said that the room was nice and tidy) and an attitude question with a five-point response scale ranging from very mean to very nice (Show me the face that shows how nice or mean Mom was when she said the room was nice and tidy).
The data were analysed by question type comparing the children’s understanding of ironic, deceptive and literal utterances as a function of age in three mixed ANOVA models and post-hoc comparisons with Bonferroni correction. For the belief question, a positive answer was considered correct for the literally true statements and a negative answer for the ironic and deception statements. Both five and seven year-olds were significantly less likely to give a correct answer to the belief question than ten year-olds were. Five year-olds found the identification of the speaker’s belief equally difficult for the three Statement Types, ten year-olds found it equally easy, and the seven year-olds showed an unexpected pattern: in this group the speaker’s belief was the most difficult to identify for lies, somewhat easier for ironic statements and easiest for literally true statements.
For the intention question, the face indicating joking was considered correct for irony, the face indicating deception for lies and the neutral face indicating that the speaker meant what he or she said for literally true statements. Both five and seven year-olds found it more difficult to identify speaker intentions than ten year-olds. As expected, irony was by far the most difficult Statement Type with no better than chance performance in the two younger groups and still far from perfect performance in the oldest group. The intention to deceive was more likely to be identified by all groups and the intention behind literally true statements was the easiest although the 5 year-olds showed considerable uncertainty here as well.
Finally, attitude responses were scored on a scale of 1 to 5 with “very mean” assigned a score of 1 and “very nice” a score of 5. With respect to speaker attitude, none of the groups distinguished irony from deception and all of them assigned significantly meaner attitudes to the speakers of these statement types than to the speakers of literally true statements, although the contrast was sharper for ten year-olds than for the younger groups..
In conclusion, the results show that young children’s difficulty with irony comprehension is a matter of both belief and intention attribution and this is not an artefact of the task. However, the deception data further suggests that when children show great resistance to attributing deceptive intentions, this seems to affect their belief judgements: they would rather reject their own beliefs (or the evidence of their own eyes) than attribute an intention of deception to a character. We therefore propose that the slow development of irony comprehension is not purely a cognitive but also a social phenomenon.
Keywords:
Irony comprehension,
theory of mind (ToM),
Intention attribution,
pragmatic development,
deception detection
Conference:
XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference, Pavia, Italy, 30 May - 1 Jun, 2018.
Presentation Type:
Poster or Oral
Topic:
Experimental Pragmatics
Citation:
Babarczy
A
(2018). Young children’s understanding of the speaker’s belief, attitude and intention in verbal irony and deception.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2018.73.00030
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
09 May 2018;
Published Online:
14 Dec 2018.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Anna Babarczy, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest, Hungary, babarczy.anna@ttk.bme.hu