Humor plays an essential role in human interactions. Precisely what makes something funny, however, remains elusive. While research on natural language understanding has made significant advancements in recent years, there has been little direct integration of humor research with computational models of language understanding. In this paper, we…

While separate pieces of research found parents offer toddlers cues to express that they are (1) joking and (2) pretending, and that toddlers and preschoolers understand intentions to (1) joke and (2) pretend, it is not yet clear whether parents and toddlers consider joking and pretending to be distinct concepts. This is important as…

We investigated humor as a context for learning about abstraction and disbelief. More specifically, we investigated how parents support humor understanding during book sharing with their toddlers. In Study 1, a corpus analysis revealed that in books aimed at 1- to 2-year-olds, humor is found more often than other forms of doing the wrong thing…