Poster #118 - Children’s Theory of Mind and irony comprehension: Does parental irony usage play a role?

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Introduction
Nowadays, irony is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but is becoming a strategy of interacting with others and way of thinking (Wampole, 2012). In the literature, there are a lot of definitions trying to describe what irony is (Wilson & Sperber, 1992; Kumon-Nakamura, Glucksberg & Brown, 1995; Attardo, 2000; Clark & Gerring, 1984). Actually, irony is non-literal language processing, which is hard to define, but can be effectively characterized. Barbe (1995) has adequately described an ironic statement as the utterance where the surface meaning is different than the intended meaning. Research in this field shows that as much as 8% of everyday adults’ conversation consist of ironic utterances (Gibbs, 2000). Surprisingly, very little is known about whether or not the use of irony influences children’s language development and social cognitive abilities such as Theory of Mind (ToM) or the ability to attribute mental states to the actions of others (Millgan, Astington & Dack, 2007).
Research Question and Methods
The present study investigated if parents' declared likelihood of using irony towards their children impacts their child’s social competencies and irony comprehension. Given past studies that show gender differences in mental state language use and ToM, we were also interested in gender-related differences in child-directed irony and their ToM. The present study involved data collected from 46 monolingual families living within Poland. To measure theory of mind ability, child participants, 8-year-olds girls and boys, completed a brief narrative task (Social Ambiguous Stories Task (SAS, Bosacki, 2000). In addition, to assess irony comprehension, children completed a narrative task entitled Irony Comprehension Task (ICT, Banasik & Bokus, 2012) in which the stories were followed by an open-ended questions of why the character said such a comment and closed comprehension question about the intended meaning of the utterance, while mothers and fathers completed a self-report questionnaire about the likelihood of using irony in conversations with their children (Attitude Towards Irony (ATI, Banasik, 2017).
Results and Discussion
Results showed that children who scored relatively high on the irony comprehension measure or recognized the correct meaning behind the ironic statements were also more likely to have mothers who reported greater use of irony usage. In contrast, no such relations were found with fathers. Gender differences in child participants’ irony comprehension scores showed that girls scored higher than boys. Girls also scored higher in ToM than boys, but no significant relations were found between children’s irony comprehension and ToM scores, nor relations between parental irony usage and their children’s ToM.
To the best of our best knowledge, this study is one of the first to investigate the influence the links between parents' attitudes towards figurative language use and their children’s ToM and irony comprehension. Implications for theory and practice regarding parental figurative language and children’s social cognitive skills are discussed.

Key words: irony comprehension, non-literal language, Theory of Mind

Authors

• Aleksandra Siemieniuk, University of Warsaw
  Presenting Author

• Sandra Bosacki, Brock University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Natalia Banasik-Jemielniak, Maria Grzegorzewska University
  Non-Presenting Author