Understanding of sarcasm in an explicit context condition of school-aged children with hearing loss

Abstract

　　This study was aimed at clarifying the understanding of sarcasm in school-aged children with hearing loss. The study was conducted in 18 children with hearing loss and 157 children with normal hearing. The subject children read two types of stories, one story that was characterized by sarcasm story (“sarcasm story”) and one story that was characterized by honesty (“honest story”), and were asked to summarize the speaker's intentions. In both types of stories, the scene or situation and the two main characters' responses to the situation were described, and at the end of the story, the question “How does the speaker really feel?” was posed. In the “sarcasm story,” the main character' statement was positive, despite the negative scene. In the “honest story,” the main character' statement and the emotional content of the scene were matched.

　　Our results showed that when the contextual information was explicitly presented, the children with hearing loss were able to intuitively understand the negative emotion of sarcastic speech just as well as the children with normal hearing could. However, some of the children with hearing loss responded qualitatively differently from those with normal hearing. Further investigation is needed to determine how these qualitative differences might affect the actual understanding of sarcasm by hearing-impaired children.