Lexical selection in action: evidence from spontaneous punning

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Punning involves wordplay for humorous effect.
• Understanding the cognitive processes behind spontaneous pun generation is crucial for linguistic and psychological research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the principles governing spontaneous pun creation in Japanese.
• To investigate the role of similarity in pun formation and listener comprehension.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of a two-year corpus of spontaneously produced Japanese puns from a single speaker.
• Examination of the relationship between source words and their transformed pun versions.
• Consideration of phonological similarity, including segmental sequence, phoneme substitution, and subphonemic features.

Main Results:

• The primary principle driving pun creation is similarity, with a preference for homophones.
• Mutations of source words are less favored, with single-phoneme substitutions preferred over larger changes.
• Spontaneous punning applies the same similarity criteria as explicit similarity judgments.
• Spoken word recognition processes, involving multiple word-form activation, facilitate pun comprehension.

Conclusions:

• Spontaneous punning is governed by a principle of similarity, favoring homophones.
• The cognitive architecture of spoken word recognition inherently supports the understanding of puns.
• This research offers insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying humor and language processing.