The recognition of communicative components of irony and lying in ages 5 to 10

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the recognition and assessment of speakers’ opinions, intentions, and attitudes with respect to utterances involving irony, lies, and literally true statements with 5 to 10-year-old children (nursery, first-form and third-form primary school children). The participants had to answer an opinion question, an intention question, and an attitude question in a multiple choice comprehension task based on a narrative. Their assessments were investigated in a binary (true/false) scale. While for nursery kids all three types of statements proved to be equally difficult, for third-formers they proved to be equally easy. Unexpectedly, first-formers were the least successful in recognizing lies as lies. There were three possible answers concerning the speaker’s intention: the speaker was kidding, he tried to put the listener off, or he meant what he had said. What the respondents found the most difficult was the recognition of the intention behind ironical satements: twe two younger groups performed at chance level, and even the oldest participants assessed the intention correctly in half of the cases only. The intention of misleading was somewhat easier to recognize for all three groups, and the literally true sentences proved to be the easiest to understand. The speaker’s attitude was measured against a five-point scale (from ‘nasty’ to ‘nice’). Irony and lying were not differentiated by any of the three groups, and all three groups assessed such speakers significantly nastier than those of literally true statements, although with ten-year-olds that difference was somewhat smaller than with the younger groups.