Abstract: Using attitude, meaning and language phenomenon detections as survey indexes, the study inspected the effects of others’ expectancy on the cognition of different types of irony among children aged 6-to10 in China. The results showed: ⑴the types of others’ expectancy （explicit or implicit）affected the attitude and meaning detections of children, but had no effects on the language phenomenon detection of children；⑵the children displayed developmental unbalance in different aspects of irony cognition.6-year-old children have possessed tentative irony cognitive ability, they began to understand the attitude and the discourse meaning of the speaker, but　they could not explain irony phenomenon correctly. Untill 10-year-old, the ability of children’s interpretation of irony phenomenon were still developing；⑶the children’ cognitive levels of different types of irony were different. There were not noticeable differences between 6-year-old children’ interpretations of two types of irony, but there were striking differences between 8-year-old and 10-year-old children’ interpretations of two types of irony. Compared with irony flatteries, 8-year-old and 10-year-old children could interpret irony criticisms better.

Key words: irony, types of irony, types of others’expectancy, age