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This study examined how self-reported sarcasm use is related to individual differences in non-Western adults. A sample of 329 Turkish speakers of high socioeconomic status completed an online survey including measures of self-reported sarcasm use, personality traits, positive and negative affect, self-presentation styles, self-esteem, as well as age and gender. Participants who reported being more likely to use sarcasm in social situations had scores indicating that they were less agreeable, less conscientious, and less emotional stable (i.e., more neurotic). Also, those who reported using sarcasm more often tended to be younger and had lower self-esteem. Self-reported sarcasm use was also positively related to both the self-promoting and the self-depreciating presentation styles. In addition to highlighting the complex relationship between individual differences and language production, these findings underscore the importance of expanding sarcasm research to include non-Western samples. © 2022 Banasik-Jemielniak et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited., Narodowym Centrum Nauki, NCN: 2019/35/D/HS2/01005, This work was supported by the National Science Center, Poland, under Grant SONATA 15 no. 2019/35/D/HS2/01005. There was no additional external funding received for this study.

An established body of literature indicates that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulty understanding figurative language due to a deficit in theory of mind, or the ability to consider the beliefs of other people. Children with ASD tend to similarly fail traditional theory of mind tasks which assess their ability to represent false beliefs. Our claim is, however, is that these tasks involve cognitive processing demands that might mask false belief understanding because they require elicited or verbal responses. We examined whether children with ASD demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with a spontaneous-response false belief task which measures children’s eye gaze durations. The two child participant groups were composed of 20 males with ASD (aged 3 to 9 years) and 20 typically developing males (aged 2 to 5 years) who were individually matched according to verbal mental age. Children with ASD and typically developing children listened to a change-of-location story accompanied by a book with matching and non-matching pictures. The final page showed the character searching for her object in a location that was either consistent or inconsistent with her belief. Both groups of children looked reliably longer at the belief-consistent picture, regardless of whether the character’s belief was true or false, though children with ASD were slower to do so. We suggest that a spontaneous response assessment technique can potentially reveal figurative language comprehension in children with ASD in future research.

Background Speakers use sarcasm to criticize others and to be funny; the indirectness of sarcasm protects the addressee's face (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Thus, appreciation of sarcasm depends on the ability to consider perspectives. Purpose We investigated development of this ability from late childhood into adulthood and examined effects of interpretive perspective and parties present. Method We presented 9- to 10-year-olds, 13- to 14-year-olds, and adults with sarcastic and literal remarks in three parties–present conditions: private evaluation, public evaluation, and gossip. Participants interpreted the speaker's attitude and humor from the addressee's perspective and, when appropriate, from the bystander's perspective. Results Children showed no influence of interpretive perspective or parties present on appreciation of the speaker's attitude or humor. Adolescents and adults, however, shifted their interpretations, judging that addressees have less favorable views of criticisms than bystanders. Further, adolescents and adults differed in their perceptions of the social functions of gossip, with adolescents showing more positive attitudes than adults toward sarcastic gossip. Conclusions We suggest that adults' disapproval of sarcastic gossip shows a deeper understanding of the utility of sarcasm's face-saving function. Thus, the ability to modulate appreciation of sarcasm according to interpretive perspective and parties present continues to develop in adolescence and into adulthood.

Robots that interact with children are becoming more common in places such as child care and hospital environments. While such robots may mistakenly provide nonsensical information, or have mechanical malfunctions, we know little of how these robot errors are perceived by children, and how they impact trust. This is particularly important when robots provide children with information or instructions, such as in education or health care. Drawing inspiration from established psychology literature investigating how children trust entities who teach or provide them with information (informants), we designed and conducted an experiment to examine how robot errors affect how young children (3-5 years old) trust robots. Our results suggest that children utilize their understanding of people to develop their perceptions of robots, and use this to determine how to interact with robots. Specifically, we found that children developed their trust model of a robot based on the robot's previous errors, similar to how they would for a person. We however failed to replicate other prior findings with robots. Our results provide insight into how children as young as 3 years old might perceive robot errors and develop trust.

We compared the comprehension of verbal irony presented in computer-mediated conversations for older children and adolescents with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASD) and typically developing (TD) controls. We also determined whether participants’ interpretations of irony were affected by the relationship between characters in the interactions. Participants role-played as addressees in computer-mediated conversations that contained ironic and literal remarks made by speakers and that varied according to the speaker's relationship with the addressee: a same-aged friend, an older relative, or no relationship information. Children and adolescents with HFASD were just as accurate as TD controls in comprehending ironic criticisms and in judging the speaker's intentions to criticize and to convey humor. Both participant groups considered the speaker's relationship with the addressee in their attributions of the ironic speaker's belief but not the speaker's intentions to convey criticism or humor. Unlike TD controls who commented on the context when typing their initial thoughts, participants with HFASD provided no response. The two groups, however, provided similarly themed typed responses for both ironic criticisms and literal compliments. We suggest that tasks which impose minimal social and verbal demands offer a promising way to assess pragmatic abilities in individuals with HFASD.

Incongruity between a positive statement and a negative context is a cue to verbal irony. Two studies examined whether school-age children and adults recognized that listeners require knowledge of context to detect irony. Specifically, the studies investigated whether participants could inhibit their own context knowledge to appropriately gauge listener interpretation of ironic intent when the listener lacked context knowledge. Adults and older children (8- to 10-year-olds), but not younger children (6- to 7-year-olds), demonstrated this recognition; their responses indicated that listeners would be less likely to interpret statements as ironic when the listeners were ignorant to an incongruent context compared with when they were knowledgeable. Second-order theory-of-mind reasoning was related to the older children's ability to shift their responses regarding listener inferences of ironic statements based on the listeners' knowledge of context.

Ironic remarks are an important aspect of everyday communication. The inferences involved in understanding a speaker's irony can be complex. How, then, do children develop the ability to understand verbal irony? The present study was designed to address this issue. Participants were 70 six- to ten-year-old children. Each child was presented with ironic criticisms and ironic compliments in the context of short puppet shows and several aspects of comprehension were assessed: appreciation of the speaker's belief, speaker's intent to tease, and speaker's attitude. The results suggest the following developmental progression: For ironic criticisms, speaker belief understanding emerges first, before understanding of speaker's intent to tease and speaker's attitude. These latter two components emerge together. For ironic compliments, speaker belief understanding emerges with understanding of the speaker's intent to tease, and an understanding of speaker attitude emerges later. We offer suggestions as to the factors that are important to development of these skills.

Two explanations for deficits underlying autism were tested: weak central coherence (WCC) and executive dysfunction. Consistent with WCC, Happé (British Journal of Developmental Psychology 15 (1997) 1) found that children with autism failed to use sentence context in pronouncing homographs. In an alternate approach, we investigated whether children with autism can use meanings of related word primes. We presented children with autism and controls with primes for homographs, semantically related, and unrelated targets. Children with autism used primes to correctly pronounce homographs upon first presentation but showed difficulty inhibiting prior responses upon later presentation of the homographs with different primes. Children with autism also showed semantic priming effects. We conclude that children with autism do not show an absolute deficit in ability to use contextual information.

We investigated whether providing information about a speaker's personality traits would influence children's interpretations and processing of verbal irony. In Experiment 1, 5- to 6-year-olds demonstrated strong understanding of personality traits and limited understanding of ironic remarks when the two were tested independently. In Experiment 2, 5- to 8-year-old children were provided with trait information about the speaker that was either congruent or incongruent with ironic remarks (e.g., nice speaker makes an ironic criticism, mean speaker makes an ironic criticism). Results showed that children's interpretations of ironic remarks were modulated by speaker personality traits and processing data revealed that older children were more efficient than younger children at coordinating cues to verbal irony.

Around 5 or 6 years of age, children begin to recognize that speakers who make ironic remarks do not believe what they literally say, but children of the same age do not show appreciation for the humor function of irony (Dews et al., 1996; Harris & Pexman, 2003). We investigated 7- to 10-year-old children's interpretations of verbal irony and focused on factors that might modulate children's impressions of humor in irony. Results showed that (a) children tended to identify with the target, not the speaker, of ironic remarks and perceived less humor in irony when they did so; (b) children's appreciation of the teasing function of irony, like the humor function of irony, continues to develop late in middle childhood; and (c) children did not use relationship information (speaker and target were friends, strangers, or enemies) as a cue to the speaker's humorous intent. We suggest that these characteristics of children's theories of verbal irony are a function of their social knowledge and representational sk...

We examined processing of verbal irony in three groups of children: (1) 18 children with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD), (2) 18 typically- developing children, matched to the first group for verbal ability, and (3) 18 typically-developing children matched to the first group for chronological age. We utilized an irony comprehension task that minimized verbal and pragmatic demands for participants. Results showed that children with HFASD were as accurate as typicallydeveloping children in judging speaker intent for ironic criticisms, but group differences in judgment latencies, eye gaze, and humor evaluations suggested that children with HFASD applied a different processing strategy for irony comprehension; one that resulted in less accurate appreciation of the social functions of irony.

In this chapter, we explore the idea that the relation between social interaction and executive functions might be best characterized as bi-directionaldirectional. That is, that while developing executive function abilities almost definitely have considerable impact on emerging social understanding in young children, social interactions may also provide significant impetus for executive development. Working from a broadly Piagetian framework we include two avenues of exploration to illustrate. The first is that social collaboration on a problem might facilitate executive processes. Here we use the example of a collaboration on a strategic deception task. The second is that exposure to the ambiguous nature of social interactions may force the child to exercise more executive control, resulting in advances in various aspects of executive function. For examples, we draw from two research literatures—children's understanding of sarcasm and children's ability to grapple with acquiring more than one language.

Adults distinguish between ironic remarks directed at targets (sarcasm) and ironic remarks not directed at specific targets. We investigated the development of children's appreciation for this distinction by presenting these speech acts to 71 five- to six-year-olds and 71 nine- to ten-year-olds. Five- to six-year-olds were beginning to understand the non-literal meanings of sarcastic speakers and ironic speakers but did not distinguish ironic and sarcastic speakers' intentions. Nine- to ten-year-olds were more accurate at understanding sarcastic and ironic speakers and they distinguished these speakers' intentions, rating sarcastic criticisms as more ‘mean’ than ironic criticisms. These results show that children can determine the non-literal meanings of sarcasm and irony by six years of age but do not distinguish the pragmatic purposes of these speech acts until later in middle childhood.