Henri Olkoniemi

In verbal irony, there is a contrast between the literal meaning of what is stated and the intended meaning of the words. As successful comprehension of irony requires going beyond lexical meaning, the ability to understand it tends to develop late compared to literal language and it is challenging for children. Numerous explanations have been proposed for the late development of irony comprehension, including emerging language and perspective-taking skills, working memory, and metapragmatic knowledge. Irony training studies have the potential to be an effective means of testing these explanations and moving beyond correlational designs. We review recent studies that tested this possibility. The results suggest that even short-term irony training can be effective for improving children’s irony comprehension accuracy, and that metapragmatic knowledge is a key mechanism of irony understanding. We outline directions for future training studies and link those to possibilities for both intervention and theory development.

Understanding verbal irony involves detecting that the speaker’s intended meaning contrasts with the literal meaning. This is challenging for children as the underlying skills required to understand irony may not be fully developed. We investigated how 10-year-olds’ working memory, empathy skills, and gender were related to their processing and comprehension of written irony. Data from two previous eye-tracking experiments with 97 children (46 girls and 51 boys) were analysed. Results showed that children with stronger empathy skills had higher irony comprehension accuracy and were less likely to reread ironic phrases. Higher working memory was linked to faster processing of irony but did not lead to higher comprehension. Conversely, lower working memory was associated with more accurate irony comprehension. Child gender was not related to irony comprehension. These results imply that working memory and emotional perspective-taking are important for children’s irony comprehension, underscoring theories that take individual differences into account.

Previous studies have examined how the COVID‐19 pandemic affected dream recall, dream content, and nightmares. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to the individual and situational factors associated with pandemic‐induced changes in dreams. The threat simulation theory of dreaming predicts that threatening situations in our waking life (situational factors) influence threatening dream content. At the same time, individual differences predispose some people to be more prone to experiencing threatening dreams more frequently than others. Using a large Finnish sample of prospective dream diaries, we analysed the relative importance of individual (e.g., belonging to a COVID‐19 risk group, life satisfaction, depression and anxiety symptoms) and situational factors (e.g., daily COVID‐19 worry, COVID‐19 media consumption, negative and positive emotions) to determine the best predictors for threatening events and COVID‐19‐related threatening events in dreams. Random forest analyses revealed that individual factors were consistently better predictors than situational factors for both threatening events and pandemic‐related threatening events in dreams. Lower life satisfaction was the only statistically significant predictor of threatening events and experiencing fewer positive emotions in the past 2 weeks was the only statistically significant predictor of pandemic‐related threatening events in dreams. These findings suggest that the propensity to experience threatening dream content, including pandemic‐related threatening events, is more of a stable trait rather than a daily fluctuating feature of dreams. In light of the threat simulation theory, it could be argued that individual variation in the proneness to simulate threatening events adaptively interacts with daily experiences to modulate threatening dream content.

In verbal irony, there is a contrast between the literal meaning of what is stated and the intended meaning of the words. As successful comprehension of irony requires going beyond lexical meaning, the ability to understand it tends to develop late compared to literal language and it is challenging for children. Numerous explanations have been proposed for the late development of irony comprehension, including emerging language and perspective-taking skills, working memory, and metapragmatic knowledge. Irony training studies have the potential to be an effective means of testing these explanations and moving beyond correlational designs. We review recent studies that tested this possibility. The results suggest that even short-term irony training can be effective for improving children’s irony comprehension accuracy, and that metapragmatic knowledge is a key mechanism of irony understanding. We outline directions for future training studies and link those to possibilities for both intervention and theory development.

Cognates facilitate vocabulary learning. However, how the magnitude of this Cognate Facilitation Effect (CFE) changes with age and its task-dependent manifestations remain unclear. Clarifying these patterns may benefit educators with evidence-based strategies to support learners across different stages and tasks. This systematic review synthesizes studies on CFE in school-aged second and foreign language learners between 1987 and 2024 (n = 36). The results showed that, firstly, the CFE follows an inverted U-shaped trajectory. It increases during early literacy (ages 6–9), peaking in middle childhood (ages 9–10), and declining thereafter. Secondly, facilitation is robust in comprehension tasks but more variable in production, where overlap can induce interference. Furthermore, we evaluate psycholinguistic models and propose integrating speech-production models to account for the interference effect of cognate production. These findings suggest educational implications: cognates can help support vocabulary development in early literacy, but more refined strategies are needed as learners advance.Keywords: cognates; cross-linguistic transfer; literacy development; psycholinguistics

Previous studies have examined how the COVID-19 pandemic affected dream recall, dream content, and nightmares. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to the individual and situational factors associated with pandemic-induced changes in dreams. The threat simulation theory of dreaming predicts that threatening situations in our waking life (situational factors) influence threatening dream content. At the same time, individual differences predispose some people to be more prone to experience threatening dreams more frequently than others. Using a large Finnish sample of prospective dream diaries, we analyzed the relative importance of individual (e.g., belonging to COVID-19 risk group, life satisfaction, depression symptoms) and situational factors (e.g., daily COVID-19 worry, COVID-19 media consumption, negative and positive emotions) to determine the best predictors for threatening events and COVID-19 related threatening events in dreams. Random forest analyses revealed that individual factors were consistently better predictors than situational factors for both threatening events and pandemic-related threatening events in dreams. Lower life satisfaction was the only statistically significant predictor for threatening events, and fewer positive emotions in the past two weeks the only statistically significant predictor for pandemic-related threatening events, in dreams. These findings suggest that the propensity to experience threatening dream content, including pandemic-related threatening events, is more of a stable trait rather than a daily fluctuating feature of dreams. In the light of the threat simulation theory, it could be argued that individual variation in the proneness to simulate threatening events adaptively interacts with daily experiences to modulate threatening dream content.

Understanding verbal irony involves detecting that the speaker’s intended meaning contrasts with the literal meaning. This is challenging for children as the underlying skills required to understand irony may not be fully developed. We investigated how 10-year-olds’ working memory, empathy skills, and gender were related to their processing and comprehension of written irony. Data from two previous eye-tracking experiments with 97 children (46 girls and 51 boys) were analysed. Results showed that children with stronger empathy skills had higher irony comprehension accuracy and were less likely to reread ironic phrases. Higher working memory was linked to faster processing of irony but did not lead to higher comprehension. Conversely, lower working memory was associated with more accurate irony comprehension. Child gender was not related to irony comprehension. These results imply that working memory and emotional perspective-taking are important for children's irony comprehension, underscoring theories that take individual differences into account.

Eye movement measures provide detailed information about the time-course of linguistic processing. The current standard for statistical analyzes of eye movement data is the linear mixed model, which assumes that the observations (i.e., eye fixation times) originate from a single process. However, many eye fixation measures typically reported in reading studies may reflect a mixture of underlying processes. For example, gaze duration, which is calculated as the sum of fixations made on a word during its first-pass reading, may contain a composite of observations originating from two types of processes: a fast and efficient process characterized by short gaze durations, and a slower and more effortful process characterized by longer gaze durations. Finite mixture models offer a statistical tool for examining whether gaze durations are driven by multiple underlying processes. Furthermore, these models allow testing hypotheses on whether linguistic manipulations influence the means of these distributions or their proportion. In the present tutorial, we briefly explain the background of this analytic approach and demonstrate how finite mixture models can be used to analyze an eye movement dataset. We suggest that finite mixture models are a valuable tool for examining the underlying processes reflected in eye fixation times or other similar measures, and hope that this tutorial will help researchers to make use of this method.

Irony comprehension requires going beyond literal meaning of words and is challenging for children. In this pre-registered study, we investigated how teaching metapragmatic knowledge in classrooms impacts written irony comprehension in 10-year-old Finnish-speaking children ( n = 41, 21 girls) compared to a control group ( n = 34, 13 girls). At pre-test, children read ironic and literal sentences embedded in stories while their eye movements were recorded. Next, the training group was taught about irony, and the control group was taught about reading comprehension. At post-test, the reading task and eye-tracking were repeated. Irony comprehension improved after metapragmatic training on irony, suggesting that metapragmatic knowledge serves an important role in irony development. However, the eye movement data suggested that training did not change the strategy children used to resolve the ironic meaning. The results highlight the potential of metapragmatic training and have implications for theories of irony comprehension.

Irony comprehension requires going beyond literal meaning of words, and is challenging for children. In this pre-registered study we investigated how teaching metapragmatic knowledge in classrooms impacts written irony comprehension in 10-year-old Finnish-speaking children (n = 41, 21 girls) compared to a control group (n = 34, 13 girls). At pre-test, children read ironic and literal sentences embedded in stories while their eye movements were recorded. Next, the training group was taught about irony, and the control group was taught about reading comprehension. At post-test, the reading task and eye-tracking were repeated. Irony comprehension improved after metapragmatic training on irony, suggesting that metapragmatic knowledge serves an important role in irony development. However, the eye movement data suggested that training did not change the strategy children used to resolve the ironic meaning. The results highlight the potential of metapragmatic training and have implications for theories of irony comprehension.