The development of children's future-oriented cognition has become a popular research topic in the past two decades. Much of this research focuses on the preschool and middle childhood years, but very little is known about the future-oriented cognitive abilities of toddlers and young preschoolers. The present study investigated the emergence of…

The purpose of the present study was to explore children's understanding of external symbols by examining the relationship between children's production and comprehension of graphic notations and verbal messages. Fifty-six children between the ages of 5 and 7 years were asked to produce both notations and a spoken message relaying to their…

Incongruity between a positive statement and a negative context is a cue to verbal irony. Two studies examined whether school-age children and adults recognized that listeners require knowledge of context to detect irony. Specifically, the studies investigated whether participants could inhibit their own context knowledge to appropriately gauge…

We investigated how children solve the interpretive problem of verbal irony. Children 5 to 8 years of age and a group of adults were presented with ironic and literal remarks in the context of short puppet shows. The speaker puppet's personality was manipulated as a cue to intent; that is, speakers were described as funny or serious. We measured…