Understanding unintended and unsuccessful ironies among Chinese primary school children

Abstract Despite the numerous studies on irony understanding, much remains unknown about how children comprehend unintended and unsuccessful ironies and the role of interlocutors’ social status in the recognition of ironic intention. The present study aimed to address this gap through randomly selecting 269 Chinese children in grades 3 and 6, with an average age of 9 and 12 years, respectively. The results indicate that: (1) both graders performed significantly better in the comprehension of regular irony than that of unintended and unsuccessful ironies; (2) there was no significant difference between 9 and 12 year-old children in the comprehension of unintended and unsuccessful ironies; (3) significant interaction between age and interlocutors’ social status was found in the understanding of unintended and unsuccessful ironies. 9-year-olds demonstrated a better understanding when both irregular types of irony happened between peers, while 12-year-olds showed a better performance under the teacher and students context. The above findings have valuable implications for figurative language teaching and research.