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…

The performance and recognition of the act of putting people on involves an awareness and use not only of aspects of the communicative process that hold for all face-to-face interaction, but also of culturally acquired aspects of communication. Teasing and punning are varieties of communicative acts that involve the use of the put-on to accomplish…