Training studies provide new insights about mechanisms of irony development

Verbal irony is a common form of figurative language. However, it can be challenging for children to understand, as successful comprehension requires going beyond lexical meaning. Thus, it is not surprising that irony comperehension is also a relatively late-developing skill. Numerous explanations have been proposed for the late development, including language and perspective taking skills, working memory, and metapragmatic knowledge. Recently, irony training studies have emerged as an effective means of testing these explanations and moving beyond correlational designs. We review recent developmental studies that tested this possibility, conducted in several countries, including Hungary, Canada, and Finland. The results suggest that even short-term irony training can be effective for improving children’s irony comprehension accuracy, and that metapragmatic knowledge is a key mechanism of irony understanding. We outline directions for future training studies and link those to possibilities for both intervention and theory development.