Contextual Support for Less Salient Homophones and Pun Humor Appreciation: Evidence From Eye Movements in Reading Chinese Homophone Puns

Abstract

Punning is an important means of creating humorous effects by intentionally exploiting semantic ambiguity. Previous psycholinguistic research on puns has mainly focused on the process of meaning retrieval in homograph puns, while it is still not entirely clear how readers dynamically utilize contextual information to understand homophone puns. In the current investigation, 68 native Chinese participants were recruited to read three types of experimental sentences while their eye movements were recorded: (1) the homophone-pun sentences where the less salient homophone was visually presented, (2) the homophone-salient sentences where the salient homophone was used, and (3) the homophone-error sentences where the critical context noun in the homophone puns was replaced with an unrelated word. Humor rating results of the homophone puns and the homophone-salient sentences demonstrated that the less salient homophones rather than the salient ones elicited much larger humor responses when presented visually in the same potential pun context. In addition, the reverse fixation pattern in the homophone area and the spill-over region also suggested that meanings of the salient homophones were more recoverable even when not presented visually. Statistical analyses of the homophone puns and the homophone-error sentences showed that the semantic relatedness between the critical context noun and the less salient homophone could significantly predict the humor rating scores of Chinese readers. Taken together, less salient homophones need to receive more contextual support to balance out the advantages of salient homophones before generating a humorous pun interpretation.

Humor experience facilitates ongoing cognitive tasks: Evidence from pun comprehension

“…In contrast, evidence supporting the humor facilitation effect was mainly based on reading times at the sentence level, usually those of the punchlines. Indeed, Zheng and Wang (2022) found prolonged reading times for the homophones in homophone puns, partly supporting the humor processing disadvantage predicted by the Space Structuring Model (Coulson et al, 2006); however, total reading times of the pun sentences were significantly shorter than their congruent controls differing only in the homophones, suggesting a humor facilitative effect could have occurred at a later stage. In addition, experimental tasks could have contributed to the above-mentioned discrepancies as well.…”

“…The experimental materials were adopted from the study of Zheng and Wang (2022) on homophone-pun comprehension, including a total of 72 one-line sentence triads falling into three conditions: homophone puns, congruent controls, and incongruent controls. The homophone puns were mostly collected from newspaper headlines, in which the less salient homophones were presented visually.…”

“…Specifically, the authors found that the participants read the homophone puns faster than the two control conditions before moving on to the funniness rating task. Zheng and Wang (2022) argued that this finding could reflect a humor facilitation effect where the readers felt more confident to move on after they had gotten the pun. Taken together, disputes still exist in the literature concerning whether humor comprehension can exert a facilitative effect on online cognitive processes.…”

“…In addition, experimental tasks could have contributed to the above-mentioned discrepancies as well. So far, evidence supporting the humor facilitation effect is mainly from studies using funniness rating tasks (e.g., Mitchell et al, 2010;Zheng and Wang, 2022). As a result, more empirical data are needed to distinguish whether the facilitative effect is resulted from the positive feedback from humor per se or due to some specific strategies that readers formed during the funniness rating task, or both.…”

“…Since most of the studies that reported such a facilitative effect have employed a funniness rating task, it was possible that the task requirements rather than enhanced cognitive efforts have led participants to spend more time reading the unfunny text in case they would miss some potential funny contents, hence the shorter reading times for their humorous counterparts (e.g., Mitchell et al, 2010). To better compare with some of the previous research, the participants read one-line sentences adopted from Zheng and Wang's (2022) study while their eye movements were recorded. They needed to rate the comprehensibility of each sentence, which could be a homophone pun, an unfunny congruent control, or an unfunny incongruent control.…”