Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2017

When do we begin to produce irony? A developmental study in adolescents

Résumé

Verbal irony is a frequent figure of speech that represents 8% of conversational turns in talk among friends according to Gibbs (2000). Children are far to produce as much irony as adults as shown by Pexman et al. (2009). Thus, even 10-year-old children produced very few ironic utterances compared with adults, less than 1% of the conversational turns. These studies point out that adolescence would be the period in which irony production widely expands. We investigated this issue with two complementary methods. First, we videotaped free discussions produced by young adolescents (mean age: 12 years 7 months) and older adolescents (mean age: 16 years 2 months). In all, we collected 2994 utterances. Analysis of this ecological corpus revealed that 2.55% of the 12-year-old adolescents’ utterances were ironic while 5.42% of the 16-year-old adolescents’ utterances were ironic. This increase, the production doubled between 12 and 16 years, was significant. Second, we asked participants to perform a short sketch with an experimenter. The context provided to the participant (a very bad day) was designed to elicit irony on the last sentence of the sketch (“it was really great”). Eighty 12-year-old adolescents participated together with 100 young adults (mean age: 20 years 3 months).
Results showed that 64% of the young adults produced irony on the last sentence while only 30% of the adolescents did it. Once again the production was doubled from 12- to 20-year-old and the increase was significant. Our data clearly establish that adolescence is the period where the production of irony mainly expands. Contrary to a common idea, language is still developing in adolescence, particularly at the pragmatic level. We will attempt to speculate about the determinants of these developments, in the light of late changes recently highlighted in the domain of social cognition (Blakemore, 2008).

References
Blakemore, S-J. (2008). The social brain in adolescence. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9(4), 267-277.
Gibbs, R. (2000). Irony in talk among friends. Metaphor and Symbol, 15, 5-27.
Pexman, P. M., Zdrazilova, L., McConnachie, D., Deater-Deckard, K., & Petrill, S. A. (2009). That was smooth, Mom: Children’s production of verbal and gestural irony. Metaphor & Symbol, 24, 237-248.

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Dates et versions

hal-04068950 , version 1 (14-04-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04068950 , version 1

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Marc Aguert, Virginie Laval. When do we begin to produce irony? A developmental study in adolescents. 14th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL 2017), International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), Jul 2017, Lyon, France. ⟨hal-04068950⟩
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