A social media simulation for investigating humor in speech acts

This report presents the development of the SocialNet Discourse Completion Task (DCT) to investigate humor in social media compliment responses. Building on observations by Bell et al. (2021), who introduced DCTs to explore L2 humor production, and Hashimoto and Nelson (2020), who emulated online forum interaction to produce language samples comparable to corpus data, this study extends DCTs to computer-mediated communication (CMC) using a “CMC-for-CMC” approach. The task engages participants with humorous contexts, amusing compliments, and close emulation of online interactions, revealing increased humor production rates. This report discusses the benefits of the instrument, provides preliminary evidence supporting its effectiveness and validity, and outlines its future directions in L2 pragmatics studies.