Irony Comprehension: Pragmatics Meets Epistemic Vigilance

The present study experimentally investigates the role of epistemic vigilance in children’s comprehension of verbal irony. We tested 186 children aged from 4/5 to 7/8 using an offline irony comprehension task and an epistemic vigilance task. In the vigilance task, we assessed children’s tendency to trust reliable informants and mistrust unreliable ones. The same informants appeared in the irony task as the target of the ironical remarks, allowing us to examine whether prior information about their reliability influenced irony interpretation. Our findings indicate that children’s epistemic vigilance significantly predicted irony comprehension when irony was directed at an unreliable target. These results provide empirical support for the hypothesis that epistemic vigilance enhances understanding of the dissociative, critical stance expressed by the ironical speaker.