Four-Year-Olds Can Understand Irony, Says Study

SOPHISTICATED UNDERSTANDING: A recent study shows that children at the age of 4 can understand their parents' ironic remarks. (Mingguo Sun/The Epoch Times)

If you use irony while talking to children, will they understand it? A recent study found that children as young as four-years-old can understand at least one form of irony. Overall, the researchers found that sarcasm was best understood by children.

The study was published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.

“Previous studies concluded that irony wasn’t understood before the age of eight or ten,” Stephanie Alexander, a postdoctoral student at the Université de Montréal, said in a press release.

“However, these studies were mostly done in a laboratory setting and mostly focused on sarcasm. We examined children at home and took into consideration four types of non-literal language: hyperbole, euphemism, sarcasm, and rhetorical questions.”

Alexander collaborated with Dr. Holly Recchia of the University of Utah, who was a Ph.D. student at Concordia University in Montreal when the study was conducted, Dr. Nana Howe of Concordia University, and Dr. Hildy Ross of the University of Waterloo. They studied family conversations recorded from 39 families with two children.

The older children in these families were six-years-old on average, while the younger children were four-years-old on average. Six 90-minute conversations were recorded for each family and later coded by the researchers.

The researchers found that while older children showed more complete understanding of the ironic language that their parents used, even four-year-olds were beginning to use some forms of irony themselves.

“Children’s understanding of complex communication is more sophisticated than we believed in the past,” Alexander said.