Metapragmatic Explanations by 8 Year olds

• In Event: Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

Introduction
Irony fulfills numerous social functions; it can strengthen social bonds, allow people to deliver criticism in a socially-approved way, and either bring speakers together when taking the form of shared play or targeting a third party. In contrast, the use of irony has the power to weaken emotional relations between interlocutors through insult, criticism, or displays of emotional detachment or social disinterest.
This study explores school-aged children’s metapragmatic awareness of irony. Metapragmatic awareness is the ability to make explicit judgments about the effectiveness, conciseness, and relevance of verbal and non-verbal social interactions (Karmiloff-Smith, 1987). Based on our past findings about children’s mental state understanding and use of figurative language (Banasisk-Jemielniak et al., 2020), this study explored eight year-olds ability to use linguistic and pragmatic conventions within the context of irony.
Method
The study was part of a larger project on humor styles and irony. The sample included 46 sets of parents (46 mothers, 41 fathers) with 8-year-old children (24 girls, 22 boys, M=8year, 5months, SD = 3.9 years) from Warsaw, Poland. The homogenous sample included middle-income Caucasian parents of Polish background with the majority parents obtaining a higher education degree. All children were neurotypical, monolingual speakers of Polish, and attended second grade of public school .
We used Irony Comprehension Task – short version (ICT-sv), a pre-recorded story comprehension task for children with open-ended questions such as ‘Why do you think X said Y?”, and closed questions checking for comprehension and asking children to assess how funny and how nice/mean the character uttering it was. Following Pike’s 1967 emic approach to linguistics, responses to the open-ended questions were analyzed according to emergent themes.
Results
Content analysis revealed seven ways in which children responded, including rephrasing, literal justifications, reference to the intended meaning, reference to emotions, and metalinguistic references with and without labels. The majority of children’s responses about a character’s utterance included negative emotions such as anger (e.g. “Because he was angry that he spilled the juice”) Children also rephrased the story (e.g. “Because he spilled a glass of juice), mentioned the intended meaning (e.g. “Because it was a new tablecloth, and it is hard to remove), and less often - the literal meaning (e.g. “Because he did a great job”). Seventeen out of 46 (37%) children used a metapragmatic explanation at least once, and three of them did it thrice. Only six children, however, referred at least once to irony and sarcasm, with only two children referencing irony/sarcasm for all three stories. Implications will discuss future research on children’s metalinguistic awareness and use of figurative language.

Authors

• Sarah Garfinkel, Harvard Graduate School of Education
  Presenting Author

• Meredith L. Rowe, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sandra Bosacki, Brock University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Natalia Banasik, Maria Grzegorzewska University
  Non-Presenting Author