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The development of children's comprehension and appreciation of riddles
Harry R M Purser1, Jo Van Herwegen2, Michael S C Thomas3
1Division of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham NG1 4FQ, UK.
Abstract:
Humor appreciation and understanding is important for children's social relationships. The current study examined the associations among riddle comprehension, riddle appreciation, and smiling/laughter in children from a wide age range (4-11 years) as well as how cognitive processing style relates to riddle comprehension. Style was distinguished between local and global language processing at the sentence level. The results showed that only children age 8 years or older showed a reliable relationship between humor comprehension and smiling/laughter. These findings show that laughter should not be taken as an automatic indicator of explicit understanding. In addition, higher vocabulary ability was independently associated with better humor comprehension. This demonstrates a separable role of language proficiency in humor comprehension and suggests avenues for future research in atypical populations known to have difficulties in this area.
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