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Assessing Sarcasm Understanding in South African Children

Atida Moyo, Chloe Winfield, Sunan Malcolm Smith

Objective: Understanding non-literal language, like sarcasm, requires inference of speakers’ intentions, which implicates Theory of Mind. Previously, a standard western lie-joke measure of sarcasm proved problematic for South African children. Assessing sarcasm understanding is an integral part of understanding ToM development in middle childhood. We thus developed a new lie-joke task for this non-western context, implementing best-practice methods indicated by literature, and evaluated its psychometric properties.

Methods: A cross-sectional study examined internal consistency and inter-rater reliability. Convergent validity was assessed using four measures associated with Theory of Mind. We assessed efficacy by asking whether the new task could differentiate sarcasm understanding between younger and older children, where older children should perform better. We also assessed whether the entire group, and those children 10 years and older (i.e., where sarcasm understanding should be present) did better than on the old task. Sixty-three children, five- fifteen years (43 males, 20 females) were recruited via snowball sampling in June - August 2020. Due to COVID-19 contact restrictions, data was collected via online platforms.

Results: Results indicated the new task was reliable, with good internal consistency and inter-rater reliability. It demonstrated convergent validity, having significant associations with three related measures. It detected the expected difference in sarcasm understanding between younger (< 10 years) and older children (d = 1.28). Importantly, all children did better on the new than the old task (d = 1.08), and the new task was better at discerning age-appropriate sarcasm understanding in older children than the original task (d = 0.98).

Conclusion: The new lie-joke task is appropriate for assessing sarcasm understanding and Theory of Mind development in English-speaking South African children. Future research should assess its performance in other non-western, LMIC contexts.