8- To- 12-year-old Children And Adults' Understanding Of The Meaning Of Verbal Irony And Their Emotional Reactions To Verbal Irony

Irony is a form of nonliteral language characterized by opposition between the literal meaning and the speaker intended meaning. According to allusion and pretense theory brought forward by Kumon-Nakamua which defined the essential features of irony, in addition to counterfactual assertions, irony can be expressed in other forms such as true assertions, questions, offerings and thanks.In present study, 8-to-12-year-old children and adults participated two experiments which conducted by the situational story method .In experiment 1, the participants were asked to judge the discourse meaning and attitude of the speaker, and to explain the speaker' s motivation. The researcher intended to explore how different forms of irony impacted the participants' understanding of the meaning of irony. In experiment 2, the participants were instructed to rate their own emotional reactions in various experimental situations, and the researcher tried to investigate how different forms of irony and different emotional categories effected the emotional reactions of the participants of different ages.The results showed:(1) 8- to- 12- year-old children's understanding of the meaning of irony improved with age, while 12 year-old children' s understanding of irony was close to adult level.(2) The forms of irony had significant impacts on 10- to -12 -year-old children and adults when they understood the meaning of irony .The counterfactual assertions and thanks were forms of irony which were understood the best, and the true assertion was one understood the worst.(3) In various ironical situations, the highest intensity of listeners' emotional reaction was sadness, and the lowest was happiness, the listeners' strength of surprise is significantly higher than that of their anger.(4) The listeners' emotional reactions to different emotion categories changed with age. The children' s intensity of sadness and surprise were higher notablely than that of adults.(5) The forms of irony influenced clearly the listeners' emotional reactions. True assertions made the listeners feel sadder than questions did. Thanks made the listeners feel more angry than counterfactual assertions and true assertions did. Counterfactual assertions and thanks brought the listeners more surprise than other forms of irony.(6) The listeners didn' t show significantly different happy, sad or angry reactions to ironic utterances and literal utterances, but they felt more surprised to the former than to the later. Thus, from the point of view of the listeners' emotional reactions, irony certainly serves humor function, but the muting function of irony is not confirmed.