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Márta Szücs and Anna Babarczy
8 The role of Theory of Mind, grammatical
competence and metapragmatic
awareness in irony comprehension
Abstract: The paper investigates the roles of Theory of Mind, receptive language
skills, and metapragmatic awareness in irony comprehension. In Experiment 1,
5–8 year-old typically developing Hungarian-speaking children completed a
series of false belief tasks, receptive syntax and vocabulary tests and an irony
comprehension test, where they were asked to attribute intentions to an actor
uttering an ironic utterance as part of a story. In Experiment 2, the children
who had shown no evidence of irony comprehension in Experiment 1 were
divided into two groups. One group underwent a metapragmatic awareness
instruction programme, where the use and purpose of everyday irony were
discussed. The other group did not participate in this programme. An irony com-
prehension test was then administered to both groups of children. We found
that while neither syntax and vocabulary scores nor false belief task perfor-
mance reliably correlated with irony comprehension, metapragmatic abilities
made a significant and pronounced contribution.
1 Introduction
Verbal irony can be informally defined as an act of communication where a
speaker is saying one thing, but means the exact opposite of what she is saying.
In Gricean terms, irony is treated as an implicature triggered by the flouting of
the maxim of Quality, that is, “Do not say what you believe to be false”(Grice
1989: 34). The post-Gricean relevance-theoretic framework reinterprets irony
and argues that it is an instance of interpretive echoic language use, through
which the speaker expresses disagreement with a thought attributed to another
person (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995; Wilson and Sperber 2004; Wilson 2013).
According to Relevance Theory, to understand an ironic expression, the hearer
has to understand not only the basic proposition expressed by an utterance,
DOI 10.1515/9781501505089-008
Márta Szücs, Department of Hungarian Language and Literature, The University of Szeged
Anna Babarczy, Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest University of Technology and
Economics
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but also the fact that it is being interpretively used. In other words, for a typical
ironic statement, the listener needs to realise that the speaker is expressing an
attitude towards a thought of someone else, rather than a belief of her own.
In this respect, from a relevance-theoretic perspective, the ability to attribute
intentional states to others, commonly known as Theory of Mind, is believed to
be a fundamental component of pragmatic competence, since it is this ability
that allows the hearer to realise that the speaker’s communicative intentions
are not explicitly expressed by the encoded semantic meaning of her utterance.
Perner and Wimmer (1985) describe two levels of belief attribution that play a
crucial role in children’s understanding of social interactions and appear at
different stages of their development: first-order beliefs involve the representa-
tion of another person’s thoughts about the real world and appear around the
4th year of age in typically developing children, while second-order beliefs
involve the representation of another person’s beliefs about someone else’s
thoughts and appear a couple of years after children have developed first-order
Theory of Mind abilities (cf. Miller 2009; Frith and Frith 2010).
The relevance-theoretic echoic interpretation of irony therefore predicts that
second-order Theory of Mind abilities, in Perner and Wimmer’s sense, are a
prerequisite to irony comprehension. This prediction is supported by empirical
evidence collected by Happé (1993), who found that autistic subjects who passed
first-order false belief tests correctly interpreted metaphors but failed to under-
stand ironic utterances, while those who passed second-order false belief tests
tended to comprehend irony as well. The performance of a small sample of
typically-developing young children in this study also reflected this pattern:
again, only those participants in the control group who passed both first-order
and second-order false belief tests understood irony. Given the results obtained,
Happé’s conclusion was that performance in Theory of Mind tasks is a very good
predictor of irony comprehension.
Other studies, however, have failed to support Happé’s interpretation of her
results. For instance, Sullivan,Winner and Hopfield (1995) and Sullivan, Winner
and Tager-Flusberg (2003) studied typically-developing children and children
with William’s syndrome, and found that second-order mental state attribution
ability precedes ironic joke comprehension by approximately two years suggest-
ing that while second-order false belief attribution may be a necessary condition
of irony comprehension, it is not a sufficient one. Other factors also appear to be
at play, one of which may be grammatical ability.
The relationship between pragmatic competence and syntactic or lexical
development has also been hotly debated. Some experimental evidence suggests
that children’s pragmatic development is dissociated from their grammatical
competence, since there appears to be a stage of language development when
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they have difficulty interpreting non-logical or non-literal meanings –adiffi-
culty that cannot be attributed to lexical or syntactic deficits (cf. Papafragou
and Musolino 2003; Bernicot and Laval 2004; Noveck 2004). Yet, other studies
have revealed correlations between receptive language skills and the com-
prehension of non-literal language, especially in relation to speech acts and
metaphors (cf. Leinonen et al’s 2003; Norbury 2005; De Mulder 2011).
Similarly, the relationship between linguistic ability in general and irony
comprehension is far from straightforward. Filippova and Astington (2008) and
Angeleri and Airenti (2014), for instance, found receptive vocabulary to have
an effect on irony comprehension in 5–9 and 3–6 year-old typically-developing
children. In both cases, however, the children’s performance on the vocabulary
task showed a strong positive correlation with their false-belief understanding,
and regression analyses revealed little additional effect of the vocabulary skills.
On the other hand, in Cutica, Bucciarelli and Bara’s (2006) non-verbal implica-
ture task where a picture representing an actor’s communicative intentions had
to be selected, patients with left hemisphere brain damage showed poor perfor-
mance if the story involved irony, such as clapping when someone was clumsy,
even though they did not display impaired performance in Theory of Mind tasks.
A meta-analysis by Milligant, Astington and Dack (2007) suggests that there
tends to be a correlation between language ability and false-belief understand-
ing, although the strength of the relationship varies greatly, which might be
a part of the explanation for the contradictory results concerning false belief
task performance and non-literal language comprehension. Even so, the meta-
analysis strongly suggests that the direction of the relationship is from language
ability to false-belief performance rather than vice versa.
Turning to a far less intensively studied explanatory factor, little attention
has been placed, in the developmental literature, on the relationship between
non-literal language comprehension and metapragmatic awareness. Metaprag-
matic awareness, which is defined as the ability to reflect on language use in a
conscious way (cf. Verschueren 2000; Wilkinson and Milosky 1987) can be seen
as a kind of interface between the linguistic and the extralinguistic level of
language use (cf. Caffi1994), which presupposes not only linguistic but also
contextual and world knowledge (cf. Collins 2013). In one of the few studies in
the area, Bernicot, Laval and Chaminaud (2007) investigated the development of
metapragmatic awareness and non-literal language comprehension in 6, 8 and
10 year-old typically-developing children. In this study, the children’s com-
prehension of non-literal language comprising semantic-inference implicatures,
indirect requests, idioms and sarcasm was measured in a phrase-picture match-
ing task, followed by a short interview where the children were asked to explain
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their initial responses. The results obtained showed that different types of non-
literal language exhibit different developmental patterns. Notably, the compre-
hension of ironic-sarcastic implicatures appeared relatively late, and, in contrast
with the other types of non-literal language studied, was accompanied by meta-
pragmatic knowledge when it was present. That is, there might be a connection
between the development of irony comprehension and metapragmatic aware-
ness, even though the nature of Bernicot, Laval and Chaminaud’s study does
not allow us to directly establish such a cause-and-effect relationship.
The effects of metapragmatic awareness, albeit not in relation to non-literal
language comprehension, were also studied by Robinson and Robinson (1982),
who used metapragmatic training to improve awareness of instruction clarity in
4–5 year-old children. The training significantly improved the children’s ability
to both give clear instructions and ask for clarification when given ambiguous
instructions. This, in turn, suggests that explicit metapragmatic training can
boost specific pragmatic abilities of preschool children.
Against this background, the investigation of the relationship between false
belief attribution, grammatical skills and metapragmatic awareness, on the one
hand, and irony comprehension, on the other, seems like a worthwhile venture.
The present study further explores this relationship, with a view to (a) shedding
additional light on the relative roles of false belief attribution and receptive
grammatical ability in irony comprehension, and (b) finding evidence for a
cause-and-effect relationship between metapragmatic awareness and irony com-
prehension that may be independent of false belief attribution and grammatical
abilities.
2 Experiment 1
A non-literal language comprehension test suitable for Hungarian-speaking pre-
school children was devised. The test contained not only ironic but also meta-
phorical and indirect speech items, but the present analysis focuses only on
irony. Apart from the non-literal language comprehension test, the group of
children participating in the study were also tested on a series of false belief
tasks, a receptive grammar test and a receptive vocabulary test. A subgroup of
these children also participated in a metapragmatic awareness instruction pro-
gramme for the purposes of Experiment 2, which will be described in Section 3.
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2.1 Participants
Seventy-one typically-developing monolingual Hungarian preschool children, 32
girls and 39 boys (age range 4;0 to 7;2, mean age 5;7) from two kindergartens in
two university towns in eastern Hungary participated in the experiment. Five
of the children could not be reached for the vocabulary test session and were
excluded from analyses involving vocabulary scores. (see Table 1 for details).
Table 1: Participant details
N (Boys, Girls) Mean Age Age Range
Irony comprehension test,
False belief tasks, TROG
71 (39, 32) 5;8 4;0−7;2
PPVT 66 (35, 31) 5;7 4;0−7;2
2.2 Materials and Procedures
2.2.1 The false belief tasks
Four traditional false belief tasks were used to assess the children’s meta-
representational skills: two tasks testing first-order and two tasks testing second-
order false belief attribution. Each task involved the description of a story or a
situation and ended in a question regarding the intentions or beliefs of one of
the story characters. To pass the test, the child needed to answer this question
correctly.
The first-order false belief tasks assessed whether a child can attribute a
false belief to a story character or to another person. To give a correct answer,
the child must be able to look beyond (or inhibit) his/her own knowledge of
reality and appreciate the false belief of the other person. In this experiment
the Hungarian translations of two well-known tests were used: the Sally-Anne
test (Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith 1985, 1986), which uses the unexpected transfer
paradigm, and the Smarties test (Hogrefe, Wimmer and Perner 1986), which uses
the unexpected content/deceptive box paradigm.
Second-order false belief tasks are more complex, and require participants
to attribute a false belief about another person’s belief to a story character. In
order to reduce the effects of test complexity, we used two relatively short and
simple tasks that had been specifically designed to reduce processing demands:
the Birthday test (Herold 2005) and the Robot test (Coull, Leekam and Bennett
2006), both of which are based on the unexpected transfer paradigm.
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2.2.2 The irony comprehension test
The non-literal language comprehension test we administered was similar to
Happé’s test (1993), but the general structure was modified, firstly, to make the
context stories less explicit in order to avoid echoing effects with young children,
and secondly, to increase the number of forced choice answers from two to three
in order to reduce the probability of selecting correct answers by chance and
allow for an analysis of error types.
The test consisted of five short stories, each illustrated by a set of four
pictures to help the children follow and remember the events in the story. Each
story included an ironic statement uttered by one of the characters in the story.
As the test sentences had to be novel non-idiomatic phrases with the individual
words of the sentences familiar to preschool children, the frequencies of the
ironic phrases and the vocabulary they contained were checked against the
Hungarian National Corpus of about 180 million words (http://corpus.nytud.
hu/mnsz; cf. Váradi 2002) and those satisfying our criteria of fewer than 15
occurrences as a phrase but more than 1500 occurrences of the individual words
were selected. Three of the ironic phrases included in the study were unrepre-
sented in the corpus and two occurred with very low frequencies (9 and 13
occurrences, all with literal meaning).
After listening to each story, the children were asked what the characters
meant by their ironic utterances and were given three possible answers to
choose from. The three options were the correct ironic interpretation, a literal
interpretation, and an interpretation of deception. The children were not given
any feedback on their answers. An example is given below:
(1) Story: Katie was helping her mother make cookies. After making the dough
they put it in the oven, and went out to the garden to play.
Unfortunately, the cookies stayed in the oven for too long, and were burnt.
Later Katie’s father came home, saw the cookies and said:
−What soft cookies! (ironic ending)
Question: Why did the father say that?
Answers to choose from:
a. He thought that the cookies are soft (literal)
b. He wanted to trick the mother (deception)
c. He expressed in a funny way that the cookies are hard (ironic)
2.2.3 The Test for Reception of Grammar
The standardised Test for Reception of Grammar test (TROG, Bishop 1983) is an
individually administered, multiple-choice test designed to assess the com-
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prehension of grammatical contrasts marked by inflection, function words and
word order, among other grammatical phenomena. The Hungarian version of
the test (Lukács, Győri and Rózsa. 2013) consists of 72 items, split up into 18
blocks of 4 items each, in order of increasing difficulty. Each block assesses the
child’s comprehension of a specific type of grammatical contrast, involving
nouns, verbs, negation, number and person agreement, and relative clauses. In
each item, the subject is shown a set of pictures and asked to point to the one
that matches the phrase or sentence produced by the tester. A block is passed
only if the child responds correctly to all 4 items and the child’sfinal score is
the number of blocks passed.
2.2.4 The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test
The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT, Dunn and Dunn 1959) is one of the
most commonly used tests to assess receptive vocabulary. In our study, we used
the Hungarian version of the test (Csányi 1974), which consists of 150 vocabulary
items of gradually increasing difficulty. To administer the PPVT, the investigator
presents a series of plates with four black-and-white pictures on each. For each
plate, the investigator utters a word and the child is asked to select the picture
that best represents the word’s meaning. The test ends when the child has
answered six consecutive items incorrectly. The child’s score is the number of
correct answers preceding the failed block.
2.2.5 General Procedure
The children were tested individually in a quiet room on the premises of their
regular kindergartens. Participation was voluntary and participants received
small gifts in way of thanks. The tests were administered in one or two sessions
depending on the needs of the child; if two sessions were needed, these were
separated by at most one week. The tests were administered in the following
order: false-belief tasks, non-literal language comprehension task, the Test for
Reception of Grammar and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Task.
2.3 Results
2.3.1 The role of false belief attribution ability
The children were classed into three different groups based on their performance
in the first- and second-order false belief tasks.
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Table 2: Number and ages of children in each ToM group
ToM group NoToM 1stToM 2ndToM
Number 29 22 20
Age (mean) 5;2 5;11 5;11
Age (range) 4;2–6;11 4;0–7;2 4;10–6;11
The children in the No-ToM group failed either one or both of the first-order
false-belief tasks. Those who passed both first-order false belief tests, but failed
one or both of the second-order tests were placed in the 1st-ToM group. Finally,
the children in the 2nd-ToM group passed all four false-belief tasks.
The results of the irony comprehension task for the children grouped by
performance on the false belief tests are shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Percentage of correct answers to irony items in each ToM group
As Figure 1 shows, the percentage of correct irony responses was similarly low
in each ToM group (25%, 40% and 37%) and a Kruskal-Wallis test comparing
the three groups showed no statistically significant difference between them.
One-Sample Wilcoxon Signed Rank tests revealed that while the No-ToM group
performed significantly below the 33% chance level (p = .023), the other two
groups’performance did not differ from chance in either direction.
An analysis of incorrect answers in the irony task might shed some light on
the strategies used by the children. Figure 2 displays the distribution of errors in
the irony task.
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Figure 2: Distribution of literal and deception answers in the irony task in each ToM group (as a
percentage of the total number of incorrect answers)
As Figure 2 reveals, the most frequent error for children in all groups was by far
the interpretation of the ironic statement as an act of deception, gathering 83%
of errors in the no-ToM group, 69% in the 1st-ToM group and 74% in the 2nd-ToM
group.
2.3.2 Results: The role of language ability
As mentioned above, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test scores could be
obtained for only 66 of the 71 children, as five of the children could not be
reached for testing within the allocated one-week time frame. Statistical tests
involving Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test scores were therefore only run on
these 66 children, while those related to the Test for Reception of Grammar
included all 71 participants. The children’s mean scores and minimum and
maximum values for the two tests are shown in Table 3.
Table 3: Mean scores, ranges and standard
deviations for the TROG and PPTV
Range Mean StDev
TROG 0–17 11.48 3.83
PPTV 62–130 87.36 19.43
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In order to explore the relative roles of Theory of Mind and language ability in
irony comprehension, hierarchical linear regression models were built for the 66
children that had completed all tests. In these models, Theory of Mind perfor-
mance was represented by the number of false belief tests passed (0 to 4), while
the Test for Reception of Grammar and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test scores
represented language ability. Besides these three variables (ToM, TROG and
PPVT), the age of the children (in months) was also included in the model, as a
variable standing for unknown factors of maturity, such as unmeasured
language ability, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and so on. As shown in
Table 4, however, the contribution of the variables was very low and barely
approaching statistical significance.
Table 4: Regression analysis predicting irony comprehension from
language abilities (TROG, PPVT), ToM and age (p value is significant
if p <0.05)
Model R
2
Standardised ß t p
1
ToM
TROG
PPVT
Age
0.123
0.179
–0.247
0.191
0.252
1.337
–1.808
–1.345
1.691
0.186
0.076
0.184
0.096
2.4 Discussion
Experiment 1 considered the development of irony comprehension in four to
seven-year-old typically-developing Hungarian-speaking children. The two ques-
tions at the heart of this investigation were: (a) What role do the children’s false
belief attribution abilities play in the comprehension of this pragmatic phenom-
enon, and (b) what is the relationship between the general language abilities of
the children and their comprehension of irony?
As regards the first question, there was no difference in irony comprehen-
sion between children at different stages of Theory of Mind ability as measured
through the false belief attribution tasks. We should note that the irony scores in
the present study were much lower than the indirect speech and metaphor com-
prehension scores (Babarczy and Szücs, in preparation) or the irony scores in
Happé’s (1993) test, and, notably, around chance level. These results therefore
have nothing to say about whether second-order false belief attribution ability
is a necessary condition for irony comprehension, but they do seem to suggest
that it is certainly not a sufficient condition.
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One possible explanation for this result could be that the children had to
understand not only the ironic meaning but also the ironic attitude as a whole
in the task. Preschool children may realise that literal/semantic meaning is not
appropriate in a given context, but they may still not be able to recognise the
speaker’s ironic attitude behind the utterance. This much is also suggested
by the error pattern: children are more prepared to believe that the speaker is
lying than that they themselves have misunderstood the literal meaning of the
utterance or perhaps the story context of the utterance. Notably, this error
pattern is consistent with the results of previous studies. Sullivan et al. (1995,
2003), for example, reported that children who were unable to recognise the
ironic attitude conveyed by ironic utterances all made the same kind of error,
namely, they considered all the ironic jokes lies.
Experiment 1 also looked at the relationship between general receptive lan-
guage development and irony comprehension. Here, we found that the variance
in irony comprehension could not be explained either by the reception of
grammar or by receptive vocabulary. This could of course be due to the low
irony scores observed throughout our sample. As some of the children reached
very high scores on the language tests (17/18 in TROG and 130/150 in PPVT),
however, it is again quite clear that good receptive grammar and vocabulary
skills do not seem to be sufficient for irony comprehension.
3 Experiment 2
Building on the results of Experiment 1, Experiment 2 was designed to investi-
gate the role of metapragmatic awareness in irony comprehension over and
above ToM and grammatical ability.
3.1 Participants
Thirty-nine children, whose irony comprehension scores on the non-literal test
in Experiment 1 were around chance level (with at most 2 out of 5 items
answered correctly), were selected as participants for the metapragmatic aware-
ness (MPA) instruction experiment. These children were randomly allocated into
two groups: 20 children in the metapragmatic awareness instruction group and
19 children in the control group, as follows:
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Table 5: Number and age (mean and range) of the children in the MPA group and in the
control group
N
(boys, girls)
Mean score on
irony test (%)
Age
(mean)
Age
(range)
MPA instruction group 20 (12, 8) 18 5;9 4;5−6;11
Control group 19 (9, 10) 15 5;4 4;2−7;2
Total 39 (21, 18) 16 5;7 4;2−7;2
3.2 Materials and procedures
The children in the metapragmatic awareness instruction group participated
in three metapragmatic awareness development sessions, where they were
explicitly taught about ironic statements and intentions. Three new irony stories
similar in content and structure to the irony test administered in Experiment 1
were constructed for the programme. Each story represented a natural dialogue
between a child and an adult and included an ironic utterance. The stories were
illustrated by pictures to aid comprehension and memory. As in Experiment 1,
the children’s task was to select the best interpretation of the ironic utterance
from three options: an ironic interpretation, a literal interpretation, and an inter-
pretation of deception.
Again, the children participated in the sessions individually. All sessions
were led by one of the investigators, who gradually reduced the amount of help
given to the child: during the first session, the three stories were fully explained
and interpreted together with the children, in the second session no explanation
was given but leading questions were asked to help the children, and in the
third one, each child was asked to provide his/her answer without help, but
feedback was given after each answer. The details of the three sessions were as
follows:
3.2.1 Instruction session 1
(2) Sample story in the metapragmatic awareness instruction programme:
Toby and his father went on holiday to Lake Balaton. Before leaving town
they had to pick up Toby’s cousin called Pete, who had been waiting for
them at the gate of his house. His father went to help him put his bag into
the car.When he noticed Pete’s bag, he said:
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Father: −What a big bag! (Ironic statement with ironic intonation)
Toby: −Daddy, why did you say that? His rucksack is so small.
Father: −Yes, I know. I was just joking about his small bag.
(explanation of the ironic statement, MPA knowledge)
During the first session, the interpretation of the ironic statement was assisted
with leading questions that allowed children to follow and understand each
step of the interpretation of the ironic statement. These questions related to (i)
knowledge of the actual state of affairs; (ii) knowledge of the difference between
the semantic meaning of the utterance and the speaker’s knowledge of the
actual state of affairs; (iii) the recognition of the inappropriateness of the decep-
tive interpretation; and (iv) the consideration of the ironic use of language:
i) Q: How big do you think the rucksack is in reality?
A: Small.
ii) Q: How big did Toby’s father say the luggage was?
A: Big.
Q: How big is the rucksack according to his father in reality?
A: Small.
iii) Q: Why did his father say that the luggage was big? Did his father want to trick
his son?
A: No, he did not want to trick him.
iv) Q: What did Toby’s father want to say when he said that?
A: (repeating the father’s response) He wanted to say in a funny way that he
thought the luggage was small.
Apart from the leading questions, the role of ironic intonation and contextual
clues were also mentioned during this session and the children’s answers to
the leading questions were further discussed. For instance, in Hungarian, there
is a special sentence structure (Ez aztán. . .), similar to the English construction
What a...,which can signal the use of irony, even though it does not necessarily
introduce an ironic statement.
3.2.2 Instruction session 2
The second sessions of the metapragmatic awareness instruction programme
were consistently held 4–5 days after the first sessions. The children heard the
same three stories as during their first session, only this time the investigator
played a more passive role. She activated the relevant metapragmatic knowledge
with the leading questions but the children were expected to answer the ques-
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tions on their own and were only given help if they had difficulty providing the
correct answers.
3.2.3 Instruction session 3
The third session was again held a few days after the second. During this
session the children’s interpretation of the ironic utterances was tested using
the metapragmatic awareness instruction material consisting of the three stories
but no leading questions were asked. After listening to each story, the children
were only asked to answer the interpretation question, i.e., to choose the correct
answer to the question about the intentions of the speaker of the ironic utterance.
The children’s correct irony answers were counted, while their incorrect answers
were also recorded. The children were then given feedback.
3.2.4 Second irony comprehension test
After the instruction programme was concluded, both the metapragmatic aware-
ness instruction group and the control group were tested again, using the irony
comprehension test used in Experiment 1, which contained five short stories
ending in an ironic utterance and three options to choose from as an answer to
the question about the interpretation of the ironic utterance (ironic, literal,
deception). Again like in Experiment 1, the number of correct answers was noted
and the children’s incorrect answers were also recorded.
3.3 Results
Table 5 below shows the mean percentages of correct answers in the two different
irony tests: the results of the first test administered in Experiment 1, the scores
achieved by the metapragmatic awareness instruction group at the third session
of their programme, and the results of the test administered after the instruction
programme.
Table 6: Mean percentages of correct answers in irony comprehension before, at the end of,
and after MPA instruction
MPA group
Mean % (StDev)
Control group
Mean % (StDev)
Irony comprehension test 1 (Experiment 1) 18 (17) 15 (16)
Irony comprehension in MPA 3rd session 88 (19) −
Irony comprehension test 2 (after MPA development
procedure)
71 (35) 18 (20)
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The results of the Metapragmatic Awareness 3rd session test (88%) clearly indi-
cate that the children in this group had no difficulty choosing the correct ironic
interpretation in a well-known context. This could, however, be the result of
simple associative learning and does not provide evidence that the children
have indeed developed metapragmatic awareness. The children would show
evidence of metapragmatic knowledge, only if they could transfer what they
had learnt to new situations. This is exactly what happened in the irony com-
prehension test following the metapragmatic awareness instruction sessions.
The results of this test reveal an enormous improvement in irony interpretation
in this group when compared to the control group: the metapragmatic aware-
ness instruction group answered correctly to 71% of the questions on average,
which is an improvement of 53 percentage points relative to the pre-instruction
test, while the corresponding figure for the control group is 18%, an improve-
ment of only 3 percentage points relative to the first irony test. The difference
between the two groups seems to be reliable as shown by statistical analysis:
independent samples t-tests showed no difference between the groups prior
to the training sessions (t(37) = –.614, n.s.) and a highly significant difference
in favour of the metapragmatic awareness instruction group after the training
sessions (t(37) = –5.832; p < 0.001).
The next question we addressed was whether metapragmatic instruction
had an effect independently of the children’s false belief attribution ability. The
20 children who participated in the instruction programme were divided into
three groups based on the their Theory of Mind performance as in Experiment 1.
A One-Way ANOVA with these three groups revealed no difference between them
(F(2, 19) = 0.24, n.s.) in terms of their performance in the second irony test.
As shown in Table 7, the means of the three groups are almost identical, which
suggests that metapragmatic training improves performance regardless of Theory
of Mind ability.
Table 7: Mean percentage of correct answers in Irony Test 2 in
the MPA instruction group by ToM ability
N
Mean score on
Irony Test 2 (%) StDev
No-ToM 8 72 30
1st ToM 5 68 46
2nd ToM 7 71 36
Similar comparisons were made in relation to receptive grammar and vocabu-
lary skills. After combining their Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and Test for
Reception of Grammar scores, we divided the children into two groups: those
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scoring below average on the combined receptive language tasks and those
scoring at or above average. As one of the children in the metapragmatic aware-
ness instruction group had not completed the PPVT task, the analysis was run
on the remaining 19 children. Table 8 shows the average scores of the two
groups:
Table 8: Mean percentage of correct answers in Irony Test 2 in the
MPA instruction group by receptive grammar and vocabulary ability
N
Mean score on
Irony Test 2 (%) StDev
Below average TROG-PPVT 10 66 27
Above average TROG-PPVT 9 73 43
Although the children with above-average receptive grammar and vocabulary
skills performed slightly better on the second irony test than the children with
below-average language ability, the difference was again not statistically signifi-
cant (t(17) = .447, n.s.).
3.4 Discussion
Experiment 2 considered the effects of enhancing children’s metapragmatic aware-
ness on irony comprehension performance in four to seven-year-old typically-
developing Hungarian-speaking children. The goal of the study was to gain
insight into the role of metapragmatic awareness training in the development
of children’s irony comprehension.
The findings demonstrated that metapragmatic awareness can indeed play
an important role in the development of irony comprehension in preschool
children and that its benefits do not depend on either false belief attribution or
linguistic ability –at least to the extent that these abilities are captured through
performance in the tasks undertaken by our participants. All in all, our results
clearly show that, if given explicit instruction, preschool children have the
ability to integrate their knowledge of linguistic (linguistic and speaker meaning
of ironic utterances) with metalinguistic rules (contextual and intonation clues)
and use this knowledge to recognise irony.
4 Conclusion
Summing up, the findings of Experiment 1 reported here have shown a loose
relationship between Theory of Mind ability and irony comprehension in
typically developing children, since a developed second-order Theory of Mind
144 Márta Szücs and Anna Babarczy
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ability did not appear to be sufficient to ensure better irony comprehension.
Grammar reception and receptive vocabulary were also found to be relatively
unrelated to irony comprehension in our group. Yet, metapragmatic training
involving drawing children’s attention to the fact that a literally false statement
may be uttered with an intention other than deception, made a dramatic differ-
ence to our group’s irony comprehension performance regardless of their ToM or
general language ability. Our Experiment 2 showed the relationship between
metapragmatic awareness and irony comprehension to be clearly causal.
It could thus be the case that the puzzlingly slow development of irony
comprehension relative to lexical and syntactic development is simply a matter
of insufficient experience with ironic language use. Given our results, it is
further possible that the direction of the relationship between false belief under-
standing and irony comprehension is not quite as simple as we had assumed;
while having a Theory of Mind may aid irony comprehension, another explana-
tion for the previously observed co-appearance of the two is that metapragmatic
knowledge of the kind needed for irony comprehension, for instance, also aids
the development of a Theory of Mind.
We therefore suggest that ironic interpretation is a social-pragmatic phenom-
enon and –under non-laboratory circumstances –children learn to comprehend
ironic statements from natural discourses, in which they meet them in a context
where the ironic interpretation is either explained or is the only cognitively plau-
sible interpretation.
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