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

Abstract

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.

Incorporating humour in the educational journey of young tourists

“…Being humorous also carries social influence, as it is an effective way to make friends and influence others (Gilgun & Sharma, 2012). Since humour is rooted in cultural values and norms (Del Ré et al, 2020), previous studies have explored its social function in children's development (e.g., Yunus & Dalli, 2019).…”

“…Children understand and use humour differently compared to adults (Del Ré et al, 2020). This is due to various factors, including their cognitive, socio-emotional, physical, and language development stages, as explained by Bergen (2021).…”

Humour-themed holistic learning processes in a Finnish primary school

“…Even the youngest pupils laugh, smile and enjoy humour. The development of pupils' humour is closely linked to family input and to pupils' linguistic and metacognitive development (Del Ré et al, 2020). Therefore, humour develops in stages; it often starts by manipulating concrete objects and moves on to playing with language and concepts.…”