A multimodal approach to children’s development of humor in family interactions

Christelle Dodane et Aliyah Morgenstern (in collaboration with Marie Leroy-Collombel)

Humor is embedded in social-cultural contexts and requires specific cognitive, interactional and linguistic skills (Thalander & Aronsson 2003). Patterns of humor development depend on children’s construction of these skills and on parental modeling or support for the child’s efforts at humor. Adults transmit their socializing practices in their daily spontaneous exchanges with their children (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984). It is thus essential to study humor in its natural habitat : daily interactions. 

The aim of this study is to uncover how the development and production of humor (McGhee, 1979) involves all semiotic resources at the child’s disposal. We analyze the development of humor in two longitudinal follow-ups of children between 1 and 7 years old recorded at home in daily activities (Morgenstern & Parisse, 2017). We use a multi-linguistic level and multimodal approach involving detailed analyses of phonology, pragmatics, discourse, gesture, facial expressions, gaze, posture, and taking into account children’s linguistic, cognitive and social development. We study how children exploit the resources available to them within the discourse context and enter a collaboration in which the adults, as experts, provide important scaffolding. We analyze the reception and production of marked expression of amusement and humor with their specific acoustic, facial and gestural components. Our mixed method combines quantitative and qualitative multidimensional analyses supported by the use of Praat, ELAN, and excel.

Our analyses illustrate the paths the children take to go from first instances of shared amusement initiated by the adults, in which they produce mainly reactive multimodal behavior such as smiling and laughing, to their own production of successful humor. The children in our dataset are at first willing participants who express their amused reactions, but they are progressively socialized into becoming co-operative actors (Goodwin, 2017) who initiate humor by combining their verbal, gestural and prosodic skills in interaction. 

Interactional features of conversational humor

Béatrice Priego-Valverde

It would be futile to attempt to draw up a list of humorous devices for at least two reasons : (1) humor does not have any specific devices or markers which could signal its presence, (2) everything can be used as a humorous device : « […] humor makes extraordinary use of ordinary linguistic devices  » (Attardo, 2020 : 153). In this presentation, I will hypothesize that these two reasons – which look like a dead end – can be overcome considering the context in which humor appears. I will argue that only the context (situational, relational and sequential) can explain why a word, an utterance, a gesture is considered humorous, here and now, by both participants.

This analysis will be based on a conversational video recording corpus : “Cheese !” (Priego-Valverde, B., B. Bigi & M. Amoyal. 2020)

Attardo, S. 2020. The linguistics of humor. An introduction. Oxford : Oxford University Press.

Priego-Valverde, B., B. Bigi & M. Amoyal. 2020. Cheese ! : A corpus of face-to–face French interactions. A case study for analyzing smiling and conversational humor. Language

Resources and Evaluation Conference. 460–468. LREC2020, May 2020, Marseille, France.

Irony in political discourse : A multimodal analysis

Dima Alkateeb

This study aims at identifying regular gestural correlates to irony in political discourse. We investigate how politicians use their hands, faces and whole bodies to express irony, as we identify co-occurring gestural features and estimate their frequency. We used YouTube video datasets (total duration : 3 hours 4 minutes) that were sourced from a variety of media, including the Correspondents’ Dinner, Al Smith dinner, presidential campaigns, interviews, and presidential debates. The videos were transcribed and annotated using ELAN for gestures and types of irony. Our findings revealed strong associations for eyebrow frowns, smiles, and small-sized hand gestures. On the contrary, eyebrow rises, head beats, eyeblinks, silent pauses, and body repositioning were evenly distributed across types of irony. We also noted a co-occurrence between pressed mouth and silent pauses. We suggest potential explanations along with developments.

Robot Humor Explored : Navigating the Depths of Laughter Logic

Heng Zhang and Adriana Tapus 

Humor functions as a secret ingredient in our social dynamics, adding flavor to our interactions and fostering closer connections. With the emergence of social robots in our daily life, there is a growing desire to endow these robots with the ability of expressing humor. One of the goals of social robots is to comprehend but also to generate appropriate humor during interactions. Nevertheless, crafting humor is more intricate than it appears. It is an art that demands a profound understanding of utilizing body language, witty language, and impeccable timing in order to act as a catalyst for positive social interactions. Additionally, considering a robot’s inherent mechanical nature, directly embodying human humor may not be the optimal approach. People’s perception on humor is different, and therefore, making the robot expressing humor in an appropriate way is a challenge. Therefore, leveraging the distinctive characteristics of social robots and mixing them with the psychological foundations of humor provides a pathway to explore the unique ways in which robots can express humor. 

“I’ve learned this about comedians : they say funny words for cheap laughs” : An analysis of irony and sarcasm in television series. 

Sabina Tabacaru and Inés Lozano

(Résumé à venir)

Humour, figurative language, and polarisation in the tweets of the Spanish far right party Vox

Silvia Peterssen

This presentation aims to show how humour and figurative language may act as polarising discursive strategies in the tweets of the Spanish populist far right political party Vox. To this end, a corpus was compiled using Twitter advanced search and analysed from a multimodal critical socio-cognitive approach to discourse and humour (Billig, 2005 ; Machin, 2013 ; Romano & Porto, 2016 ; Van Dijk, 2018). The corpus includes all the tweets (60 tweets) containing the laughing emojis posted between 2022 and 2023 in the Twitter verified accounts of Vox, Santiago Abascal (i.e., the president of the party), Jorge Buxadé and Javier Ortega-Smith (i.e., vice-presidents of the party). The results suggest that humour in Vox’s tweets is mostly used to negatively portray the opposition and the media and to create affiliations, hence serving as a tool to perpetuate the ‘Us’ (i.e., the oppressed people) versus ‘Them’ (i.e., the oppressive elites) polarising populist schema (Wodak, 2011). In addition, the humorous polarising conceptualisations are often construed by means of metaphorical and ironic expressions and realised multimodally.