Children’s development of humour in everyday interactions: two case-studies in French and Brazilian Portuguese

• Authors: Alessandra Del Ré , Christelle Dodane , Aliyah Morgenstern , Alessandra Jacqueline Vieira
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In order to understand how children learn to recognize and use humor in their own cultural environment, we have chosen to study their production in two different languages and cultures. We studied a French-speaking monolingual child and a Brazilian Portuguese-speaking child, video-recorded once a month up to seven years old. The detailed multimodal linguistic coding of our data enabled us to draw the multimodal paths the two children followed from the first instances of shared amusement initiated by the adult, expressed mainly through reactive behavior such as laughing, to the children’s own verbal production of successful humor in dialogue. Our study demonstrates that the production of children’s humor is closely linked to the family input (their micro-culture), and to children’s multimodal linguistic and meta-cognitive development. We did not observe important differences between the two children at the macro-cultural level, but there were noticeable inter-individual differences.

Keywords

EN

Humour; Children; French; Brazilian; Development; Microculture

• Publisher: Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies
• Journal: The European Journal of Humour Research
• Year: 2020
• Volume: 8
• Issue: 4

Dates

published

2020

online

2020-12-09

Contributors

author

Alessandra Del Ré

author

Christelle Dodane

author

Aliyah Morgenstern

author

Alessandra Jacqueline Vieira

Identifiers

DOI

10.7592/EJHR2020.8.4.Del-re