This chapter describes how children learn to produce and understand irony. Children do not usually understand irony very well until age 6 or so, a developmental process that continues to unfold throughout childhood. Pexman explores how children’s developing cognitive and linguistic skills (e.g., theory of mind abilities, specific language skills, executive functions related to metarepresentaitonal reasoning, emotion recognition, and epistemic vigilance) are critical to their becoming competent in understanding irony. Research on adults’ irony understanding suggests that part of children’s irony abilities may be explained via the parallel-constraint-satisfaction (PCS) theory that demonstrates how language, quite generally, is comprehended via the online integration of multiple discourse and sociocultural cues. Pexman discusses new findings from studies that may offer greater precision in detailing exactly how both children and adults detect and combine various cues in a predictive manner to quickly infer the complexities of ironic messages. She also sketches out several concrete directions for future experimental studies to better understand when and how children understand irony.

Chapter 4: Cognitive Issues in Reading. Underlying cognitive skills that support reading include the following: Implicit and explicit learning, frequency of experience with language, automaticity, statistical knowledge and statistical learning, associative learning and emergence (analogy), real-time processing skills (inhibition control, eager processing, predictive processing), speed of processing, the use of background knowledge, conceptualization and categorization, motivation and engagement, and contextual processing. Underlying cognitive skills are the keys to language learning and reading development. Specific concepts addressed include now-or-never processing, chunk-and-pass processing, connectionism, Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN), long-term memory and background knowledge, the several roles of context effects on reading, and semantic priming. The chapter concludes with implications for instruction.

Language is one of the most remarkable developmental accomplishments of childhood and a tool for life. Over the course of childhood and adolescence, language and literacy develop in dynamic complementarity, shaped by children’s developmental circumstances. Children’s developmental circumstances include characteristics of the child, their parents, family, communities and schools, and the social and cultural contexts in which they grow up. This chapter uses data collected in Growing up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) that was linked to Australia’s National Assessment of Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) to quantify the effects of multiple risk factors on children’s language and literacy development. Latent class analysis and growth curve modelling are used to identify children’s developmental circumstances (i.e. risk profiles) and quantify the effects of different clusters of risk factors on children’s receptive vocabulary growth and reading achievement from age 4 to 15. The developmental circumstances that gave rise to stark inequalities in language and literacy comprise distinct clustering of sociodemographic, cognitive and non-cognitive risk factors. The results point to the need for cross-cutting social, health and education policies and coordinated multi-agency interventions efforts to address social determinants and break the cycle of developmental disadvantage.

Chapter 5 evaluates the role of education in China’s rapid growth. In 1980, China was one of the poorest countries in the world, but the average years of schooling of its adult population was already near that of a middle-income country. This relatively high educational level was an advantage for China’s economic development. However, this advantage all but disappeared by 2005. China’s greatest advantage turns out to be in the quality rather than quantity of education. According to the cognitive skills index produced by Eric Hanushek and his coauthors, who use it as a measure of a country’s educational quality, China ranks the best among all developing nations. This factor alone may explain a very significant 4 percentage point difference in GDP per capita growth between China and developing countries such as Peru and South Africa. It is shown that China’s advantage in the quality of schooling is not due to more investment in education by the government. Instead, it is the traditional Confucian culture that has made people in China and other East Asian economies influenced by the culture value of education more than people in most other developing countries.