Humour from 12 to 36 months: Insights into children’s socio-cognitive and language development

Abstract

The relationship between laughter, humour, and socio-cognitive development in infants has attracted scholarly attention, yet structured longitudinal studies remain sparse. This study examines humour appreciation and production in four North American children from the Providence Corpus (Demuth et al., 2006). We annotated 30 min of naturalistic mother–child interactions at six-month intervals (12, 18, 24, 30, and 36 months). We identify 271 humorous episodes following two criteria (Archakis and Tsakona, 2005): (1) the presence of laughter and (2) the identification of an incongruity, i.e. Script Opposition (SO) (GTVH, Attardo (2001)). Each episode was analysed for SO type — im/possible, ab/normal, or non/actual—following Hempelmann and Ruch (2005) hierarchical framework. To explore the developmental relevance, we propose a classification of SOs by knowledge Domains: Natural World & Objects, Social-sphere, and Metalinguistic-sphere.

Findings reveal distinct SO and Domain distributions between mothers and children, developmental trajectories in SOs and Domains, and interactions between them. Between 12 and 30 months, children favoured humourous episodes involving multiple SOs, suggesting a need for multiple cues to interpret mothers’ humorous intent, potentially influencing maternal behaviour. Notably, our results contribute, together with previous studies, in refining McGhee (1979) humour developmental stages, showing that some types of humour emerge earlier than previously postulated. This study provides a detailed investigation of humour in child development from 12 to 36 months, illustrating how humour production and perception reflect cognitive, pragmatic, and linguistic development and offer insights into children’s knowledge acquisition — insights often challenging to access through experimental testing.