"Sure I'll help-I've just been sitting around doing nothing at school all day": Cognitive flexibility and child irony interpretation

Age Three: Milestone in the Development of Cognitive Flexibility

Although the cognitive flexibility (CF) of preschool children has been extensively studied, the development of CF in children around three years old is unclear. This study aimed to investigate the CF of three-year-olds in a stepwise rule-induction task (sRIT) comprising nine steps in which children are encouraged to switch attention to a new rule and then implicitly inhibit the old one. A pair of boxes was displayed at each step, and children aged 2.5 to 3.5 years were asked to select the target. When children learned a rule (e.g., the shape rule), they were encouraged to switch rules through negative feedback. The results showed that most children (81.10%) passed at least one of the two sets of the sRIT, and children over the age of three years performed better than those under three years. Additionally, a positive correlation existed between rule switching and rule generalization, whereby the old rule was implicitly inhibited. These findings indicate that age three might be a milestone in the development of CF, and inhibitory control might play a vital role in rule switching.

From mindreading to originality: Exploring the relationship between Theory of Mind and Creativity across the lifespan

In the previous psychoeducational literature, many theorists have argued that creativity and originality require the ability to make predictions and assumptions regarding other individuals' ideas. Thus, it has been widely hypothesized that social cognition and theory of mind (ToM) might be a fundamental component or even a prerequisite of creativity. Despite their common grounds, the empirical evidence examining the potential link between ToM and creative thinking throughout their development seems to be indirect, limited, and fragmented. In this respect, this scoping review aimed to collect and synthesize the existing knowledge about the relationship between ToM and creativity at different ages to identify significant literature gaps and generate updated research questions that might guide future research. The search process led to the inclusion, analysis, and collation of 6 relevant studies only, indicating that this research topic has been poorly investigated. Results demonstrated that ToM and creativity are strongly correlated even after partialling out significant mediators, such as age and intelligence. Such a strong association should be further investigated and explained.

"Mom said it in quotation marks!" Irony comprehension and metapragmatic awareness in 8-year-olds

This study investigated links between the development of children's understanding of ironic comments and their metapragmatic knowledge. Forty-six 8-year-olds completed the short version of the Irony Comprehension Task, during which they were presented with ironic comments in three stories and asked to provide reasons for why the speaker in a story uttered an ironic comment. We coded their responses and compared the results to similar data collected previously with 5-year-olds. Results showed that compared to younger children, 8-year-olds frequently refer to interlocutors' emotions, intentions, and to metapragmatics. These results support the view that comprehension of verbal irony is an emerging skill in children.

More than one path to pragmatics? Insights from children's grasp of implicit, figurative and ironical meaning

Human communication requires impressive inferential abilities and mind-reading skills. To learn how to speak and become competent communicators children need both. The development of pragmatic abilities presents us with a puzzle. On the one hand, much evidence suggests pragmatics play a grounding role in early communication and language acquisition. On the other, preschoolers find linguistic pragmatic inferences such as implicatures, metaphor and irony difficult to grasp. Apperly and Butterfill (2009) maintain that there are two separate systems for belief reasoning: a simpler one and a more sophisticated one that develops later. Along this line of reasoning we might also expect there to be two separate kinds of pragmatic abilities: an early set using (among other things) the simpler Theory of Mind system, and a more sophisticated one appearing later in childhood and using full-blown Theory of Mind. I will argue there is no need to divide pragmatic abilities in such a way to bridge the gap between the pragmatic inferential skills found in toddlers and the difficulties observed in preschoolers. Evidence from the past two decades indicates that phenomena such as implicatures and metaphor (but not irony) can be understood earlier than previously established. Additionally, children's apparent struggle with specific pragmatic inferences might be better explained by factors independent from pragmatic competence, but which interact with it.

The relationship between metaphor skills and Theory of Mind in middle childhood: Task and developmental effects

Theoretical pragmatics in the post-Gricean tradition argued that metaphor requires understanding of how another person sees the world. Yet, it is unclear what role mindreading plays in developing metaphor skills. Here we examined the relationship between metaphor and Theory of Mind (ToM) in middle childhood by using two different tasks. In addition to the Physical and Mental Metaphors task (PMM), based on the verbal explanation of physical and mental metaphors, we revived the Referential Metaphors task for children (Noveck, Bianco, & Castry, 2001), where metaphorical and literal referents are presented in a narrative context. The sample included 169 8-, 9-, and 10-year-old children, assessed also for ToM (via the Strange Stories) and other linguistic and cognitive skills as control variables. In the PMM, ToM supported the understanding of mental (but not physical) metaphors in 9-year-olds only, whereas in the Referential Metaphors task ToM supported accuracy of understanding metaphors (but not literal items) in younger children as well. At age 10, ToM effects were negligible in both tasks. These findings suggest that ToM has a task-specific role in metaphor, linked to the characteristics of the items in the task at stake, being for instance greater for metaphors with mental (compared to physical) content and for non-literal (compared to literal) referents. The findings also suggest that the relationship between ToM and metaphor skills is developmental sensitive, as children start to capitalize on ToM earlier in development when the metaphor context is richer, and these effects fade with age. Theoretically, these data argue in favor of the relevance-theoretic account of metaphor, spelling out different ways in which ToM might support metaphor resolution across tasks, for instance by providing better access to the psychological lexicon (i.e., terms referring to mental states) and better context processing, serving as a springboard to achieve sophisticated pragmatic skills in middle childhood.

Children's processing of written irony: An eye-tracking study

Ironic language is challenging for many people to understand, and particularly for children. Comprehending irony is considered a major milestone in children's development, as it requires inferring the intentions of the person who is being ironic. However, the theories of irony comprehension generally do not address developmental changes, and there are limited data on children's processing of verbal irony. In the present pre-registered study, we examined, for the first time, how children process and comprehend written irony in comparison to adults. Seventy participants took part in the study (35 10-year-old children and 35 adults). In the experiment, participants read ironic and literal sentences embedded in story contexts while their eye movements were recorded. They also responded to a text memory question and an inference question after each story, and children's levels of reading skills were measured. Results showed that for both children and adults comprehending written irony was more difficult than for literal texts (the "irony effect") and was more challenging for children than for adults. Moreover, although children showed longer overall reading times than adults, processing of ironic stories was largely similar between children and adults. One group difference was that for children, more accurate irony comprehension was qualified by faster reading times whereas for adults more accurate irony comprehension involved slower reading times. Interestingly, both age groups were able to adapt to task context and improve their irony processing across trials. These results provide new insights about the costs of irony and development of the ability to overcome them.

An Experimental Study on Sarcasm Comprehension in School Children: The Possible Role of Contextual, Linguistics and Meta-Representative Factors

Understanding sarcasm is a complex ability, which includes several processes. Previous studies demonstrated the possible roles of linguistic and meta-representative factors in understanding sarcasm in school children, while the influence of specific contextual variables still needs to be investigated. Here, we present two studies investigating the possible role of contextual, linguistics, and meta-representative factors in understanding sarcasm in school children. In Study 1, we investigated sarcasm comprehension in 8-9-year-old school children in three different contexts, in which both familiarity and authority were manipulated. We found that understanding sarcasm was facilitated when the conversational partner was characterized by a high level of authority and familiarity (the mother) rather than when the conversational partner was an adult with a lower level of both authority and familiarity (the cashier of a food store). In Study 2, we replicated and extended Study 1 by investigating the possible influence of the same contextual factors but in a more sizeable sample and at different ages: first, third, and fifth grades of primary school. We found that understanding sarcasm improved significantly with age. The results of both studies indicated that understanding sarcasm is influenced by contextual factors. Children at any age better understood sarcasm produced by a speaker with a high level of both familiarity and authority. This ability improved with age. These results expand our understanding of how children infer a speaker's intentions in sarcasm. This might be particularly of interest to develop possible interventions for children on the Autism Spectrum, who are known to misunderstand sarcasm at different levels of complexity.