Abstract
Abstract
This study investigates verbal irony comprehension by 6-year old bilingual children speaking Polish and English and living in the USA. Researchers have predominantly focused on monolingual populations when examining non-literal language in young children. This is the first exploratory study of how irony is comprehended by children growing up in a bilingual setting. Results suggest that 6-year olds from this population score high in decoding the intended meaning behind an ironic utterance and that there is a relation between this ability and the development of their theory of mind (ToM). Interestingly, the data suggests that in the tested sample, no difference could be observed between comprehension of sarcastic irony (i.e., irony containing the element of blame directed towards the addressee) and non-sarcastic irony (irony without criticism towards the interlocutor). The results may be a basis for assuming that irony comprehension may be different in bilingual, compared to monolingual, samples.
Reference51 articles.
1. Ackerman, B.P. (1982). Contextual integration and utterance interpretation: The ability of children and adults to interpret sarcastic utterances. Child Development, 53 (4), 1075–1083.
2. Ackerman, B.P. (1983). Form and function in children’s understanding of ironic utterances. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 35 (3), 487–508.
3. Andrews, J., Rosenblatt, E., Malkus, U., Gardner, H., & Winner, E. (1986). Children’s abilities to distinguish metaphoric and ironic utterances from mistakes and lies. Communication and Cognition, 19, 281–298.
4. Banasik, N. (2013). Non-literal speech comprehension in preschool children – an example from a study on verbal ironny. Psychology of Language and Communication, 17 (3), 309–323.
5. Banasik, N. & Bokus, B. (2012). Measuring the understanding of verbal irony in children. Poster presented at the Conference Psycholinguistics in Flanders, Berg en Dal.
Cited by
7 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献，注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献，订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献