Comprehension of irony in autistic children: The role of theory of mind and executive function.
Second-order theory-of-mind—not executive function—explains why autistic children miss irony.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked the kids to listen to short stories. Half of the kids had autism, half were neurotypical.
After each story the child answered: 'Was the speaker joking or serious?' This tested irony comprehension.
Kids also took two kinds of tests: second-order theory-of-mind tasks and executive-function games. The goal was to see which skill best explained irony scores.
What they found
Autistic children picked the correct meaning only a large share of the time. Their peers without autism scored a large share.
Statistical tests showed second-order ToM gaps fully explained the irony problem. Executive-function scores added no extra explanation.
How this fits with other research
Carr (1994) saw the same pattern thirty years ago. Able autistic adults who passed classic false-belief tasks still failed rich story-based mental-state questions. The new study shows the weakness now appears earlier and hurts irony.
Petit et al. (2025) extends the picture. They found autistic kids also miss scalar implicatures ('some' means 'not all') yet understand metaphors fine. Together the papers map a selective pragmatic profile: second-order ToM problems block irony and implicatures, but not every non-literal form.
Richman et al. (2001) is a direct predecessor. Their case series first reported that high-functioning autistic children with fluent speech still fail advanced inferences. Yongning et al. now pin the failure on second-order ToM, not general language or executive skills.
Why it matters
If a client can pass simple false-belief tests but misses jokes, teasing, or sarcasm, probe second-order ToM, not working memory. Add lessons that make the speaker's hidden belief visible: thought bubbles, video pause-and-predict, or graphic organizers. Targeting executive functions alone is unlikely to close the irony gap.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Although previous studies have examined irony comprehension in autistic children and potential impact factors, the relationship between theory of mind (ToM), executive function (EF), symptoms of autism, and comprehension of irony in this population remains largely unknown. This study explored irony comprehension in autistic children and examined the roles of ToM and EF in linking autism symptoms to deficits in irony comprehension. Twenty autistic children were compared with 25 typically developing (TD) children in an irony story picture task, ToM task, and EF task. The results showed that autistic children had impaired comprehension of irony compared with TD children, and performance on ironic stories showed a significant moderate discriminatory effect in predicting autistic children. A ToM deficit has also been proposed for autistic children. Comprehension of irony was significantly correlated with second-order ToM (2nd ToM) but was not significantly correlated with any components of EF. Moreover, 2nd ToM can predict the level of irony comprehension and mediate the relationship between symptoms of autism and irony comprehension. Taken together, these findings suggest that irony comprehension may offer a potential cognitive marker for quantifying syndrome manifestations in autistic children, and 2nd ToM may provide insight into the theoretical mechanism underlying the deficit in irony comprehension in this population.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2024 · doi:10.1002/aur.3051