U-shaped behavior in multilingual children’s written production of jokes

Abstract

The joke is a genre of oral literature acquired during childhood and adolescence. Together with other figurative uses of language it is bound to cognitive developments. The goal of this study is analyzing some developmental aspects of the written production of jokes and finding suitable coding categories for the analysis. A sample of 234 multilingual children and adolescents from 6 to 16 years of age were selected from the CesCa corpus (Catalan Written in Schools of Catalonia). They had been asked to write a joke or a funny situation. The categories proved quite suitable to code types of responses in terms of speech acts, types of texts, types of jokes, production errors and multilingualism in use. The results showed an increasing development by age groups and some u-shaped behaviors by age. We interpret u-shape behavior as a point of cognitive restructuring according to the Representational Redescription Model (RRM). Regarding multilingualism, jokes showed more code-switching than other humorous texts, but an increase of Catalan use and a descent in code-switching. The study of joke production in developmental perspective has proven to be a promising domain of inquiry deserving further exploration.