Developments Of Psychological Research On 6-12-year-old Chinese Children's Understanding Of Irony

Irony is one form of indirect speech and it is the most difficult linguistic phenomenon for children to understand. Irony is a form of rhetoric intending to express the original intention by the literal form which is contrary to the original intention.Researching on children's understanding of irony can help us to find out the developmental discipline of children's language and to reveal the mechanism of cognitive development.By means of situational story method, the present study investigated the 6-12-year-old Chinese children's understanding of irony. The study is consisted by two parts: (1) to examine the developmental trends and mistake types in 6-12-year-old children's understanding of direct and indirect irony; (2) to explore the role of related knowledge in children's understanding of irony. The results mainly are as follows.1. As for the developmental trends of children's understanding of direct and indirect irony, we found that they are not in synchrony. Children's ability to understand direct irony have appeared at 6 and rapidly developed at 8 and been reaching maturity at 10, but to indirect irony, appeared at 6 and slowly developed at 8 and rapidly developed at 10 and been reaching maturity at 12.2. There is no significant difference between direct and indirect irony in 6-year-old and 12-year-old children, but it is more difficult for 8-year-old and 10-year-old children in indirect irony understanding.3. The children showed developmental imbalance in different aspects of irony cognition. Some 6-year-old children had begun to understand the attitudes and the discourse meanings of the irony speakers initially, but could not explain the speech purpose of irony correctly. Most of the 12-year-old children could understand the attitudes and the discourse meanings of the irony and explain the speech purpose of irony correctly.4. The main types of mistakes in 6-12-year-old children's understanding of irony are as following: taking irony as sincere utterance, encouraging utterance, cheating words or no reason. The younger children mainly took irony as sincere utterance and the older children mainly took it as cheating words.5. Children's understanding of irony could be improved by knowledge training. One of the reasons of difficulty in children's understanding of irony is that lack of relevant knowledge. As soon as the children gained relevant knowledge, their ability to understand irony would be improved greatly.