The relationship between irony comprehension, behavior regulation and theory of mind in preschool age

Context and relevance. Cultural-historical psychology makes it possible to describe the phenomenon of irony and the specific features of its comprehension in terms of social and cultural norms. In recent years, the search for effective tools of children’s socialization has increasingly turned to the study of how children understand irony, particularly irony used as an indirect evaluation of a child’s behavior. The regulation of preschoolers’ behavior is associated with rules transmitted by adults in social developmental situations, which determine children’s cultural congruence. It is assumed that the understanding of irony is related to theory of mind, which makes it relevant to study behavioral regulation both in the context of irony comprehension and in connection with theory of mind. Objective. To identify the relationship between irony comprehension, the level of behavioral regulation in children expressed as cultural congruence, and indicators of their theory of mind development. Hypothesis. Children’s understanding of irony is related to their cultural congruence as well as to their theory of mind. Methods and Materials. The study involved 75 preschoolers from Kazan (M = 59,02; SD = 3,1; 35 boys). Cultural congruence was assessed using the Cultural Congruence Questionnaire; irony comprehension was measured with tasks translated and adapted for this study; theory of mind was assessed using the respective subtest from the NEPSY-II battery. To identify the nature of the relationships, Spearman’s correlation analysis was applied. Results. The findings show that five-year-old children’s understanding of irony is associated with their parents’ assessments of the cultural congruence factors “obedience” and “safety”. The level of theory of mind development demonstrated a significant correlation with the cultural congruence factor “self-control”. Conclusions. Preschool children’s comprehension of irony opens new avenues for studying the metacognitive, communicative, and emotional domains of personality. The revealed interconnections among irony comprehension, cultural congruence, and theory of mind provide a foundation for developing new approaches to the practice of supporting behavioral regulation in preschool children.

Introduction

In line with the ideas of cultural-historical psychology, in recent years the task of creating practices that facilitate child development has become increasingly relevant — practices that, in the discourse of L.S. Vygotsky, are known as those contributing to the formation of a “new” person (Vygotsky, 1982). The search for such practices inevitably leads to the analysis of the social situation of development and the means available in the annals of culture that contribute to optimal communication between child and adult. In this context, irony may be considered as a cultural practice, as a type of humor that is undoubtedly a product of the cultural-historical development of society. I. Dombrovskaya, when describing the psychological cultural genesis of humor within the framework of L.S. Vygotsky’s concept, notes that in what is funny for a child, “…development proceeds from the interpsychological to the intrapsychological, from the reaction of laughter to the laughter and amusing actions of an adult to the ability to independently find and create the funny” (Dombrovskaya, 2022, p. 28). Irony, acting as a communicative means that simultaneously contains two modes of communication — a normative situation and a situation involving a violated rule — primarilyfacilitates the creation of opportunities for “meaningful use of a communicative means” (Soldatenkova, 2025, p. 36). Irony comprehension in ontogenesis develops under certain conditions of interaction between child and adult; therefore, the question of whether children understand implicature (the unexpressed meaning of a phrase or text reconstructed from context) appears highly ambiguous. The relevance of studying irony and humor in general is determined by the circumstance that, in the social situation of child development at the early stages of ontogenesis, there is a search for effective forms of transmitting cultural norms. Humor and irony, as one of its forms of manifestation, may be considered among such forms (Bayanova et al., 2025). A number of researchers write that there exists an acute social demand for research on humor in childhood. Thus, A.A. Korsak and E.M. Ivanova note that “…over recent decades, studies of the sense of humor in psychology have achieved significant success; however, understanding of the mechanisms of its development in childhood lags considerably behind the fundamental studies in this field” (Korsak, Ivanova, 2025, p. 12). The relevance of studying irony is also associated with the demand for early diagnosis of ASD and the development of programs for social skills development (Song et al., 2024).

According to Paul Grice, in communicative implicatures it is important not what a participant in dialogue says, but how they say it (Grice, 1975). Irony is a vivid example of such a communicative implicature. F. Köder and I. Falkum point out that irony presupposes a “thought about a thought”, i.e., a second-order metarepresentation, and that to grasp it, the listener must be able (a) to understand the utterance and (b) to recognize the speaker’s dismissive attitude toward that thought (Köder, Falkum, 2021).

There are differing opinions regarding the age at which children begin to understand irony (Banasik, Bokus, 2019; Massaro et al., 2013). The earliest age at which understanding of irony has been detected is 3—4 years, as noted in a number of studies (Loukusa, Leinonen, 2008). Russian authors O.B. Chesnokova and G.S. Svetova write that understanding of irony develops in the range from 6 to 11 years of age; the authors associate this with the development of intelligence and the capacity for reflection (Chesnokova, Svetova, 2016). However, there are researchers who express doubt regarding understanding of irony even at the age of eight, when children poorly understand the hidden meaning of ironic utterances (Nicholson et al., 2013). The factors that might contribute to the development of irony comprehension in children, as stated by F. Köder and I. Falkum, have been insufficiently studied (Köder, Falkum, 2021). Among the predictors contributing to understanding of irony, or more broadly to a child’s pragmatic competence, the primary ones identified are theory of mind (Song et al., 2024) and executive functions (Oshchepkova et al., 2025), particularly the development of inhibitory control (Kyriacou, Köder, 2024; Smith J. et al., 2024; Valles-Capetillo E. et al., 2025). However, it is important to note that irony comprehension, as well as pragmatic competence in general, presupposes extracting the meaning of an utterance within a social context (Kortava, 2024). Studies concerning metacognitions (Veraksa et al., 2024) and psychological well-being (González-Arratia López-Fuentes et al., 2025) have shown that cognitive regulation of activity is necessary for a child’s social development. As for the regulation of children’s behavior through their adherence to social norms, as well as the interrelation of this normative cultural congruence with the development of speech comprehension in a social context, particularly understanding of irony, this aspect of the approach to irony comprehension remains very limited in research, and the present study is intended to fill this gap and analyze the relationship between irony comprehension and both the child’s level of theory of mind development and their social skills and representations.

The age at which irony is introduced into communicative discourse with a child depends to a greater extent on the cultural traditions of irony use as such. Among studies of irony in children are works devoted to the peculiarities of irony comprehension in French-speaking children (Bucci, Premeti, 2024), Italian-speaking preschoolers (Massaro et al., 2013), as well as children speaking Finnish (Loukusa et al., 2008), Polish (Banasik, Bokus, 2019), and Chinese (Kuang et al., 2024).

The study of irony comprehension in Russian-speaking preschool children appears to be a new task not only within developmental psychology but also in the cross-cultural sense due to the absence of studies on this topic.

Normative bias of irony

Researchers in the field of pragmatics define the meaning of irony through its normativity. There is an opinion that irony possesses such a property as “normative bias” (Köder, Falkum, 2021). In an ironic utterance, according to Wilson and Sperber (2012), it is usually indicated that the state of affairs does not correspond to certain expectations based on norms, and the speaker’s norm-based expectations have been violated (Wilson, Sperber, 2012). Thus, irony is a special means by which culture, represented by the adult, conducts a dialogue with the child, pointing out the discrepancy between the child’s behavior and what is expected. Children’s assimilation of norms occurs by no means solely through direct instructions and prohibitions. Already at the age of three, children spontaneously infer social norms based on observations of adult behavior (Schmidt et al., 2016). L.S. Vygotsky’s thesis that the development of the psyche is determined by culture is well known (Vygotsky, 1984). The cultural context is referred to as the “developmental niche”, which contains rules and values (Super, Harkness, 1997). The developmental niche influences the formation of socially desirable behavior, as demonstrated by a number of studies (Albert, Trommsdorff, 2014). The developmental niche, as the context of a child’s psychological development containing norms and values, is only potentially included in the social situation of development, since cultural-historical psychology interprets the social situation of development as a “…system of relations between a child of a given age and social reality” (Vygotsky, 1984, p. 244). As V.T. Kudryavtsev rightly notes, when studying developmental processes, it is important to remember that “…it is not the individual child who develops, but the ‘child—adult’ interaction” (Kudryavtsev, 1999). Irony, as a fact of communication between adult and child, has a specific function in the process of transmitting cultural norms.

The regulation of children’s behavior is associated with rules indicating certain boundaries that limit the spontaneity of the child’s activity. The very situation with a given rule is normative, since a cultural norm in the form of a rule has been transmitted into such a situation (Veraksa, 2000). The normative nature of culture was formed conventionally — people agreed on the rules according to which they were to live and interact. Naturally, a child’s socialization is associated with the assimilation of cultural norms and the formation of behavioral patterns in accordance with rules. According to A.R. Luria, the methods of behavioral regulation with respect to rules assimilated by the child through interaction with adults during the preschool years represent a kind of building block for the creation of higher-order cognitive control mechanisms (Luria, 2002). In preschool childhood, rules related to self-care dominate, when children are required to clean up their toys (Bayanova, Mustafin, 2016). If a child has formed behavioral patterns corresponding to rules typical for their age, then one speaks of their cultural congruence. Cultural congruence is the outcome of experiencing the social situation of development, where regulation of behavior is formed through interaction with an adult — what L.I. Bozhovich calls “involuntary voluntariness”, allowing the child to internalize the rule in a normative situation (Bozhovich, 1982). We emphasize that cultural congruence not only presupposes compliance with an individual rule, but is a regulatory personality characteristic manifested in the conformity of a child’s behavior to a system of rules typical for a given age.

The formation of cultural congruence in preschoolers as the ability to regulate behavior in accordance with rules occurs in child—adult interaction. At the same time, the adult uses various means of communication to transmit the rule, including implicatures. It is important to identify the extent to which understanding irony is associated with cultural congruence — the ability to regulate behavior with respect to typical rules — as well as to identify the relationship between irony comprehension and cultural congruence with theory of mind. This task is determined by the circumstance that theory of mind denotes the metacognitive ability to understand both one’s own mental states and the mental states of other people (Albert et al., 2014). Theory of mind, as a model of the mental, includes a number of intellectual characteristics — the capacity for decentration and understanding the intentions and thoughts of others, metacognitive ability, establishing cause-and-effect relationships, the ability to understand figures of speech, and the ability to differentiate between real and imaginary planes of reality. The research goal of identifying the relationship between irony comprehension, cultural congruence, and theory of mind can be achieved given baseline data — namely, understanding of irony by Russian-speaking five-year-old children, since such results have not previously been obtained.

The hypothesis of our study is that cultural congruence, as a reflection of a child’s assimilation of social norms, will be interconnected with the child’s ability to understand speech in an indirect meaning, i.e., relying on the social context and social situation. We assume that among the identified factors of cultural congruence — obedience, safety, self-care, and self-control — obedience and safety may be most strongly associated with understanding implicatures, since it is these factors that, according to the questionnaire structure (Bayanova, Mustafin, 2016), reflect the child’s psychological and age-related readiness to follow the rules implied by the given context. As for theory of mind, as a construct reflecting the capacity for decentration and the ability to switch from one’s own perspective to another person’s perspective, according to our hypothesis it will be most strongly associated with the “Self-control” scale.

Materials and methods

Sample

The study involved 75 preschool children aged five years (age in months: M = 59,02; SD = 3,1) attending kindergartens in Kazan. The sample included 35 boys and 40 girls. Informed parental consent was obtained for each child who participated in the study. The study was conducted in a comfortable environment for the children.

Study design

To assess irony comprehension, children were presented with diagnostic materials in the form of stories depicted in pictures and involving the child’s evaluation of the literal or opposite meaning of an utterance (Köder, Falkum, 2021). The stories were structured as follows: a parent depicted in the picture tells the child what is expected of them. For example, a mother asks a boy to clean his room. A question is used to check whether the participants understood the parents’ expectations, and if not, the children were told the story again with reference to the corresponding picture. Then the child in the picture either fulfills or violates the parent’s expectations; for example, the boy cleans his room or leaves it messy. In response, the parent either praises or criticizes the child using one of the following types of utterances: literal praise (for example: “That’s great! You cleaned up very well”), literal criticism (for example: “That’s bad! You still didn’t clean up!”), and ironic criticism (although the child still did not clean up, the parent says: “Well done! Excellent cleaning”). The participant had to determine what emotion the parent was experiencing: whether the parent approved or disapproved of the child regardless of the literal utterance. The child chose between two emoticons — a smiling face and a sad face — thereby demonstrating understanding or misunderstanding of irony. The method consisted of 12 stories, 3 of which specifically represented ironic parental remarks. In the diagnostic assessment, children could receive from 0 to 3 points for irony comprehension.

The method for determining cultural congruence in preschoolers (Bayanova, Mustafin, 2016) is a checklist for parents in which they evaluate the degree to which their child’s behavior corresponds to typical normative behavioral rules. The method diagnoses the ability to regulate behavior with respect to rules — cultural congruence according to four factors: “obedience, compliance with adults’ expectations”, “safety”, “self-care, hygiene”, and “self-control”.

Theory of mind as a model of the mental was diagnosed using the “Theory of Mind” (ToM) methodology (NEPSY-II subtest) (Korkman et al., 2007). This method is aimed at diagnosing the development of various components of theory of mind. The method consists of a series of tasks aimed at decentration, the emotional component, and the logical-verbal component, including understanding figurative meanings of words. The method consists of 21 tasks for which children may receive from 1 to 3 points. The maximum score is 28.

The main variable of interest was irony comprehension. The results for this variable were distributed non-normally (Shapiro-Wilk W = 0,809; p < 0,001); therefore, the use of Pearson correlation would have been statistically unjustified. Instead, Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was applied, since it does not assume normality of data and is robust to discreteness and platykurtic distributions. The jamovi software package was used (The jamovi project, 2021).

Results

As a result of Spearman’s correlation analysis, significant relationships were identified between irony comprehension, certain aspects of cultural congruence marking the regulation of a child’s behavior in normative situations typical for their age, and theory of mind. The obtained results are shown in the Table.

Discussion

Thus, when testing our hypothesis regarding the relationship between cultural congruence, the level of theory of mind development, and irony comprehension in children, Spearman’s correlation analysis showed that the most significant relationships (at the p < 0,001 level) were identified between irony comprehension and such characteristics of children’s cultural congruence as obedience (rho = 0,37) and adherence to safety norms (rho = 0,46). As for theory of mind, it was found to be

Table

The relationship between indicators of irony comprehension, cultural congruence, and theory of mind in preschool age (N = 75)

significantly associated with such a characteristic of cultural congruence as self-control (rho = 0,268, p < 0,05). 

The results of the correlation analysis reveal a relationship between irony comprehension and two factors of cultural congruence — obedience and safety. The obedience factor includes rules of behavioral regulation related to adults’ expectations. Preschoolers with high indicators of behavioral congruence with respect to rules of interaction with adults understand irony better. Adherence to rules related to safety is also associated with irony comprehension. These facts may indicate that implicature in communication with preschool children is used more often in situations involving the presentation of rules related to safety and interaction with adults than in situations related to self-care and self-control.

The obtained results made it possible to answer a number of questions important for studying the characteristics of irony comprehension in preschool children. Alongside previous studies conducted with preschoolers from different countries, including Poland, Finland, France, and Italy, irony comprehension was also identified in a sample of Russian-speaking Russian preschoolers. More than half of the respondents (74,3%) demonstrated irony comprehension, whereas approximately one quarter of the five-year-old children in the sample did not understand irony (25,7%). Considering that the main characteristic of irony is its normative bias, we assumed that irony comprehension is associated with the regulation of behavior in a normative situation with a given rule — with cultural congruence. The research objective also included a factor associated with the rational capacity to analyze situations — theory of mind.

In the present study, regarding theory of mind, the conclusions of E.A. Sergienko were confirmed, namely that at the age of 5—6 years the child reaches the level of “…a naïve subject, when one’s own model of the mental can not only be separated from the model of the mental of the Other, but also the possibility emerges of mentally influencing it; the model becomes situationally independent” (Sergienko et al., 2009, p. 79). In the model obtained by us, a correlation was found between theory of mind scores and the “self-control” factor of cultural congruence.

The study as a whole confirms the thesis that irony possesses the property of normative bias and contains knowledge about cultural norms, which in turn constitutes a key unit for analyzing behavior. In the cultural-historical concept, L.S. Vygotsky draws attention to the comic in children’s behavior at the end of preschool age, when the child clowns around, pretends to be a jester, and wants to appear funny to others (Vygotsky, 1984), thus entering into a peculiar dialogue with others. This dialogue resembles play, in which, according to V.T. Kudryavtsev, there exists an “ontogenetic precedent”, manifested in what L.S. Vygotsky called the child’s attempt in play to “…make a leap above the level of their ordinary behavior” (Vygotsky, 2004, p. 220). In this sense, the study of irony in connection with play activity opens new possibilities for investigating the child’s subject qualities, since both irony and play involve a rule as a unit of behavioral organization and the maintenance of this rule in two contexts.

The fact of the relationship between irony comprehension, theory of mind, and behavioral regulation has prospects for development in practical work with children related to rule assimilation, socialization, and the formation of executive functions, which requires the inclusion of plots with ironic content in preschool education programs.

The interdisciplinarity of irony as a subject of research is evident; precisely such an approach, from both psychologists and linguists, opens prospects for posing the problem of irony in terms of its ambiguous content. The study of irony has potential for investigating communication as one of the causes of communication barriers. Studies of irony in connection with children’s decoding of text meanings during reading appear promising (Barich et al., 2025).

Conclusion

The conducted study showed that five-year-old children are capable of understanding situations containing implicit, ironic meaning. At the same time, irony comprehension is associated with a number of factors of cultural congruence as a regulatory ability expressed in the conformity of the child’s behavior to the rules imposed upon them. The factors “obedience” and “safety”, which unite normative situations involving rules concerning compliance with adults’ expectations and safe behavior, have significant correlational relationships with preschool children’s irony comprehension. Theory of mind is associated with such a factor of cultural congruence as self-control, which is explained by the reflexivity and metacognitive property of self-control, involving the child’s capacity to analyze their own actions and behavior. Thus, the research hypotheses were fully confirmed. Irony comprehension as part of pragmatic competence, or the understanding and use of speech in a social context, is indeed associated with children’s cultural congruence. The development in children of such an aspect of cultural congruence as safety (or adherence to safety rules established by adults) makes a particularly significant contribution to irony comprehension.

Limitations. These findings should be interpreted with caution due to potential response biases inherent in parent-report measures. Future work will employ direct observational or physiological methods to corroborate the results.

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