Understanding of ironic and literal utterances in 4–9-year-old typically developing children: role of age, narrative skills, emotion comprehension and executive functions

Language comprehension is essential to communication, yet understanding varies between literal meaning and verbal irony. While children grasp words' surface meanings, interpreting verbal irony requires them to consider context and infer the speaker's true intent, revealing a deeper layer of meaning. What factors contribute to this complex skill? The current study examined the impact of sex, narrative skills, executive functions (working memory and inhibitory control), theory of mind and emotion comprehension, while controlling for age, on understanding of literal statements and verbal irony in 267 typically developing 4-9-year old children (130 boys). To assess children's irony comprehension, we presented them with cartoon scenarios and asked to choose an emoji to indicate whether a parent's reaction was literal or ironic. A full-null model approach was used to examine the impact of children's cognitive, executive, emotional, and narrative skills on their irony understanding, where the full contained our factors of interest and the null contained only age and sex. The results indicated that age was the only factor related to literal meaning comprehension. In contrast, both age and working memory were significantly related to irony understanding. These findings can be used as a foundation for developing training to enhance non-literal language and pragmatic skills in children.