Are pun mechanisms universal? A comparative analysis across language families

Guidi, Annarita

doi:10.1515/humor-2012-0017

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 9 publications

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“…Puns are one such case. Unlike temporary ambiguity, punning is a rhetorical device consisting of intentional exploitation of phonetic measures to evoke two meanings (Guidi, 2012). In the example used by Coulson and Severens (2007) "During branding, cowboys have sore calves, " quite intuitively, successful appreciation of the humorous effect of the pun requires one to access both the "cow" and "leg" meanings of the homograph calf.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Effect of Salience on Chinese Pun Comprehension: A Visual World Paradigm Study

Zheng

Wang

2020

Front. Psychol.

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The present study adopted the printed-word visual world paradigm to investigate the salience effect on Chinese pun comprehension. In such an experiment, participants listen to a spoken sentence while looking at a visual display of four printed words (including a semantic competitor, a phonological competitor, and two unrelated distractors). Previous studies based on alphabetic languages have found robust phonological effects (participants fixated more at phonological competitors than distractors during the unfolding of the spoken target words), while controversy remains regarding the existence of a similar semantic effect. A recent Chinese study reported reliable semantic effects in two experiments using this paradigm, suggesting that Chinese participants could actively map the semantic input from the auditory modality with the semantic information retrieved from printed words. In light of their study, we designed an experiment with two conditions: a replication condition to test the validity of using the printed-word world paradigm in Chinese semantic research, and a pun condition to assess the role played by salience during pun comprehension. Indeed, global analyses have revealed robust semantic effects in both experimental conditions, where participants were found more attracted to the semantic competitors than to the distractors with the emergence of target words. More importantly, the local analyses from the pun condition have shown that the participants were more attracted to the semantic competitors related to the salient meaning of the ambiguous word in a pun than to those related to the less salient meanings within 200 ms after target word offset. This finding suggests that the salient meaning of the ambiguous word in a pun is activated and assessed faster than its less salient counterpart. The initial advantage observed in the present study is consistent with the prediction of the graded salience hypothesis rather than the direct access model.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effect of Salience on Chinese Pun Comprehension: A Visual World Paradigm Study

Zheng

Wang

2020

Front. Psychol.

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Humor

Attardo

2020

Handbook of Pragmatics

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Pun processing from a psycholinguistic perspective: Introducing the Model of Psycholinguistic Hemispheric Incongruity Laughter (M.PHIL)

McHugh

2016

Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition

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Ambiguity processing was examined using a stimulus set consisting of homograph puns in which semantic salience, as measured by semantic co-occurrence, was manipulated. Two lexical decision tasks using puns as primes for ambiguous targets revealed that high co-occurrence meanings were processed faster than low co-occurrence meanings. A divided visual field protocol revealed involvement of both hemispheres, but with the pattern of priming from the right visual field more similar to that of the centrally presented condition than the left visual field pattern. In contrast to the lexical decision data that favoured high co-occurrence targets, data from a forced-choice relatedness task showed an advantage for the low co-occurrence associates. Results from this series of experiments are consistent with Bryden's [(1982). Laterality: Functional asymmetry in the intact brain. New York, NY: Academic Press] proposal that there are several different laterality effects when processing language and emotionally valent stimuli. The results are used to frame a working model of pun processing based on the Graded Salience Hypothesis [Giora, R. (1997). Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics, 8(3), 183-206].

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Are pun mechanisms universal? A comparative analysis across language families

Cited by 4 publications

References 9 publications

The Effect of Salience on Chinese Pun Comprehension: A Visual World Paradigm Study

The Effect of Salience on Chinese Pun Comprehension: A Visual World Paradigm Study

Humor

Pun processing from a psycholinguistic perspective: Introducing the Model of Psycholinguistic Hemispheric Incongruity Laughter (M.PHIL)

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