The Influence of Intentional and Accidental Moral Transgressions on Children’s Understanding of Verbal Irony

Children have difficulties with inferring the intended meaning of ironic utterances. In the current study, we investigated whether the situation in which irony is used would help five- to eight-year-old children to understand the ironic speaker’s beliefs (i.e., what the speaker thinks) and intentions (i.e., what the speaker wants the listener to know). Specifically, we compared situations with intentional moral transgressions (e.g., a child intentionally breaking another child’s toy) with situations with accidental moral transgressions (e.g., a child accidentally breaking another child’s toy). We hypothesized that children’s irony understanding would be better in situations with intentional transgressions, because such situations create a bigger contrast between the negative valence of the transgression and the positive valence of the utterance’s literal meaning. Contrary to our expectations, we found that children’s understanding of the ironic speaker’s beliefs and intentions did not differ for situations with intentional and accidental moral transgressions, even though they distinguished between these transgressions in a separate moral judgment task. We provide three possible explanations for the lack of an influence of transgression intent on irony understanding. Further, we discuss our experience with investigating children’s irony understanding remotely as well as ideas for future studies on the role of moral transgressions in irony understanding.