Irony comprehension requires going beyond literal meaning to infer a speaker’s dissociative stance. Pragmatic accounts propose that this entails evaluating a speaker’s vigilance towards the falsity or irrelevance of the literal proposition, a cognitively demanding process even for adults. Yet, previous research often presupposes successful irony comprehension, focusing on processing measures rather than directly testing interpretive accuracy. This study adopts a theory-driven approach by manipulating speaker cues as pragmatic markers of epistemic vigilance and assessing their impact on irony processing and comprehension. Participants read vignettes with ironical or literal utterances produced by speakers described as epistemically vigilant or non-vigilant. Online processing was assessed through reading times, while irony understanding was measured with polar questions probing interpretations of the speaker’s belief and communicative intent. Results showed that participants often misinterpreted ironical statements but were significantly more accurate when speakers were described as vigilant, indicating that speaker-based epistemic cues guide pragmatic interpretation. This effect emerged in comprehension but not in online processing, suggesting that evaluations of speaker intent occur later during more reflective stages of interpretation. These findings underscore the interpretive complexity of irony, challenge assumptions about its automatic understanding in adults, and highlight the socially situated nature of pragmatic inference, with implications for theories of communication and language processing.

The prolonged developmental window of irony understanding opens up the question of which socio-cognitive repertoire underlies this pragmatic capacity. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between epistemic vigilance and irony understanding in 5/6- and 6/7-year-old children using a picture selection task. We assessed children’s vigilance towards unreliable informants and manipulated the reliability of the irony target. Our findings confirm that irony comprehension is a late-emerging skill and highlight the need to differentiate its full-fledged understanding from mere sensitivity to contextual mismatches. While irony understanding was not affected by our reliability manipulation, our findings revealed that more vigilant children were better at irony understanding than less vigilant ones. This provides the first empirical evidence that epistemic vigilance is a good predictor of irony performance and lays the ground for future research on the intricate relationship between these two capacities.

The paper proposes a refined analysis of the semantics and pragmatics of the Norwegian non-truth-conditional adverb jo ‘after all, of course’. According to the literature, jo indicates that the proposition is ‘given’ in some sense or other. Based on new empirical investigations, we argue that the Relevance-theoretic notion mutual manifestness (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995, Blass 2000) accurately captures the givenness aspect of jo, and we demonstrate through authentic examples what it means for a proposition to be mutually manifest. In addition to mutual manifestness, jo signals that the proposition is a premise for deriving a conclusion. The conclusion often – but not always – opposes someone’s view. We argue that the frequent opposition interpretations are a consequence of the nature of the procedures encoded by jo. In addition to clarifying the semantic and pragmatic properties of jo, the paper sheds light on the Relevance-theoretic notion procedural semantics as well as illustrating its usefulness in the study of pragmatic particles.

Episodic memory has been analyzed in a number of different ways in both philosophy and psychology, and most controversy has centered on its self-referential, autonoetic character. Here, we offer a comprehensive characterization of episodic memory in representational terms and propose a novel functional account on this basis. We argue that episodic memory should be understood as a distinctive epistemic attitude taken toward an event simulation. In this view, episodic memory has a metarepresentational format and should not be equated with beliefs about the past. Instead, empirical findings suggest that the contents of human episodic memory are often constructed in the service of the explicit justification of such beliefs. Existing accounts of episodic memory function that have focused on explaining its constructive character through its role in future-oriented mental time travel do justice neither to its capacity to ground veridical beliefs about the past nor to its representational format. We provide an account of the metarepresentational structure of episodic memory in terms of its role in communicative interaction. The generative nature of recollection allows us to represent and communicate the reasons why we hold certain beliefs about the past. In this process, autonoesis corresponds to the capacity to determine when and how to assert epistemic authority in making claims about the past. A domain where such claims are indispensable are human social engagements. Such engagements commonly require the justification of entitlements and obligations, which is often possible only by explicit reference to specific past events.