LEIRO

Abstract Irony comprehension is a complex pragmatic skill developing late in childhood, with inconsistent findings regarding the acquisition age. One reason for this inconsistency could be that previous studies focused on different components of irony comprehension (e.g., speaker belief, emotion, meaning, intent), relied on metapragmatic questions, or used offline measures. Building on recent methods combining offline tasks with eye-tracking, we developed LEIRO, a tool for testing irony comprehension in children aged 3 and older. LEIRO presents vignette stories, requiring children to select objects based on target utterances, while eye-tracking and pupillometry measure implicit comprehension. A pilot study with German-speaking 7-year-olds ( n = 15) and adults ( n = 13), conducted primarily to test the method in practice, showed only limited irony comprehension in children compared to adults. LEIRO will be made available for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies to advance the research on, and thus our understanding of, the development of irony comprehension.