REVIEW article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1672104
This article is part of the Research TopicReviews in Psychology of Language - Volume IIView all 6 articles
The Importance of Intonation for Children's Understanding of Verbal Irony
Provisionally accepted
- University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
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Verbal irony refers to any utterance in which the speaker's words mean something different from their intended meaning (e.g., "You're really on top of things" said to a disorganized person). For children who are just learning to recognize verbal irony, a crucial cue to the ironist's intended meaning is their intonation. In this narrative review, we describe research methods for examining how intonation influences children's understanding of verbal irony and the task demands researchers need to consider when designing these studies. Next, we examine how children weigh different cues to verbal irony as they grow older, and we identify cross-linguistic factors that can impact children's use of intonation for irony comprehension. We offer suggestions for planning future studies on this topic by stressing the importance of reducing task demands, acoustically analyzing directional frequency changes, examining children's intonation consideration in languages other than English, and comparing across tonal and non-tonal languages.
Keywords: Sarcasm, Prosody, Task demands, cognitive, linguistic, Cross-linguistic
Received: 23 Jul 2025; Accepted: 27 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Smith and Glenwright. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Melanie Glenwright, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
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