No abstract

The experiment reported here investigated infants' concept of intention, as well as the relation among intention understanding, general productive vocabulary, and internal state language production during the 2nd year. Results from an imitation task indicated that 18-month-olds are better able to differentiate between intentional and accidental actions than 14-month-olds. Although there was no relation between infants' performance on the intention task and their general productive vocabulary, internal state language production at 30 months was predicted by infants' ability to differentiate between intentional and accidental actions about a year earlier. These findings shed light on the developmental progression of infants' concept of intention, as well as on the continuity between infants' understanding of intentional action and their ability to use internal state words.Requests for reprints should be sent to Kara M. Olineck,

In the present research, the authors examined the effects of self-perceived use of sarcasm on the production, interpretation, and processing of verbal irony. Accordingly, they first devised and evaluated a sarcasm self-report scale (SSS). In Experiment 1, results showed that participants’ self-perceived use of sarcastic irony (as assessed by the SSS) predicted their use of ironic statements in a production task and was related to their interpretation of ironic criticisms and ironic compliments. In Experiment 2, results showed that participants’ perceived use of irony was related to their processing of ironic statements: SSS scores were related to relative processing speeds for literal and ironic statements. The results of these experiments indicate that there are individual differences in purported use of sarcasm that influence interpretation and processing of verbal irony.

Katz and Pexman reported that certain occupations (e.g., comedian) were associated with ironic speech and that participants rated metaphors as more sarcastic when speakers were members of such occupations. In the present research, the authors investigated whether speaker occupation was a cue to ironic intent when the statements were not metaphors (e.g., literal statements such as "you are a wonderful friend," potentially an ironic insult, and "you are a terrible friend," potentially an ironic compliment). Results of Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that speaker occupation stereotypes were routinely integrated in the comprehension process but only cued ironic intent when other contextual cues were minimal. Results of Experiment 3 demonstrated that speaker occupation stereotypes involve particular types of information in the context of potentially ironic speech: a speaker's perceived tendencies to be humorous, to criticize, to be sincere, and also a speaker's perceived education level.

In these studies, we examined how a default assumption about word meaning, the mutual exclusivity assumption and an intentional cue, gaze direction, interacted to guide 24-month-olds' object-word mappings. In Expt 1, when the experimenter's gaze was consistent with the mutual exclusivity assumption, novel word mappings were facilitated. When the experimenter's eye-gaze was in conflict with the mutual exclusivity cue, children demonstrated a tendency to rely on the mutual exclusivity assumption rather than follow the experimenter's gaze to map the label to the object. In Expt 2, children relied on the experimenter's gaze direction to successfully map both a first label to a novel object and a second label to a familiar object. Moreover, infants mapped second labels to familiar objects to the same degree that they mapped first labels to novel objects. These findings are discussed with regard to children's use of convergent and divergent cues in indirect word mapping contexts.