Explaining children’s comprehension of verbal irony

Abstract Several theories explain how adults understand verbal irony, but only a few have been generalized to explain children’s comprehension of verbal irony. In this narrative review paper, we identify cues to verbal irony (Theme 1), related cognitive skills (Theme 2), and social experience (Theme 3) as three main themes in the existing developmental verbal irony literature. Next, we review papers where researchers have directly tested theories with children to determine which theories have been generalized to explain these themes. This allows us to identify which research domains have received a theoretical interpretation, and which ones should be theoretically examined in future research. Based on our summary, we suggest that the Parallel Constraint Satisfaction (PCS) framework provides a promising verbal irony theory, and we identify directions for future research for testing the PCS framework.