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Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition
Edited by Danielle Matthews
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 10] 2014
► pp. 261–278

Irony production and comprehension

This review sketches some recent approaches and research findings on children’s production and comprehension of discourse irony and situational irony. The separate treatment of production and comprehension in the overview of each of the two kinds of irony helps in highlighting children’s reliance on different competencies for their generating and interpreting irony, respectively. The definition-challenge section highlights the form and content of irony across different domains of research inquiry, and is followed by a discussion of methodological challenges leading to seeming inconsistencies across the reported findings. The final section offers suggestions for more ecologically valid research methods and calls for combining quantitative and qualitative methods in future studies of irony in both children and adults.

Published online: 26 June 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.10.15fil
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