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APACS AND BLED SANTA LUCIA, TWO TESTS FOR ANALYZING THE PERCEPTION OF ITALIAN HUMOROUS JOKES IN SUBJECTS WITH AND WITHOUT DYSLEXIA.

Nicoletta Simi1*
  • 1 Università degli Studi di Pisa, Italy

The social functions of humor are widely recognized, and humour and laughter have been characterized as “one of life’s most subtle and sublime forms of communication” (LaPointe, Mowrer, & Case, 1990). According to Attardo (1994: 92), the relation between opposite scripts is at the very basis of the humorous functioning of the text which is described by the author as the text quality which allows a joke, a pun or a much longer monologue to be recognized as humorous regardless of any clear physical reactions, that can be triggered by the text itself. It is argued that the effects of humour and irony often depend on a subversive relationship between the initial and alternative frames, which adds to both cognitive and social meaning. Understanding these effects requires consideration of the expansion of common ground (Clark, 1996) and relevance effects (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) triggered by the shift from a culturally-licensed to a subversive frame. Few studies (Griffiths, 2007; Lam & Ho, 2014; Cardillo et al., 2017) have been conducted on the pragmatics deficits associated with dyslexia. The present work stems from the desire to answer a few questions that, to the best of my knowledge, have not yet been answered. Humor processing requires both lexical competence and the ability to reanalyze the scripts (i.e. keeping information in short-term memory and going back and forth in the text to construct new meanings). Through the tests we ran on humour, we tried to determine if integrating different scripts (and frames) can be hard on people with and without dyslexia. The study involved 63 Italian-speaking university students. The focus group included 33 people with dyslexia with an age mean of 21,3 years (14 were males and 19 females) and 30 students without any learning differences with an age mean of 21,7 years (22 females and 8 males). All the participants volunteered to participate in the study. The two groups were matched as closely as possible (see fig. 1 for the groups’ demographic data). Two batteries of tests were given to both groups: APACS (The Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates, Arcara & Bambini, 2016) and BLED Santa Lucia (Batteria sul Linguaggio dell’Emisfero Destro Santa Lucia, Rinaldi et al. 2006). Both tests were designed to evaluate pragmatic abilities in clinical populations and in patients with right hemisphere damage. Participants are presented with 7 (APACS) and 10 (BLED) items, each featuring a brief story. For each story, three possible endings are provided, including: a correct funny ending, an incorrect non humorous ending and an incorrect unrelated, non-sequitur ending. Funny endings rely on either play on literal and polysemous word meanings, or on the derivation of unexpected scenarios. In most cases, a reanalysis of the previous text is necessary in order to arrive at the intended meaning. The participants included in the focus group showed impairment in information retrieval with consequences on the fluency and verbal expression levels. Such inefficiency was observed in all the participants although in different degrees. The tasks requiring memory seem to result in the highest number of errors. Further impairment was found in the pragmatic abilities assessed by the battery of tests, especially in drawing inferences and understanding figurative language. As expected, no difficulties were detected among the participants in the control group. A Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney test was run on the data from both batteries for both groups, both the data of the general and individual performance of the two groups were analysed. The focus group showed a deficient performance in almost every trial. A statistically significant p value (< 0.05) was detected on four trials for the BLED battery and on one trial only for the APACS battery (See fig. 2). Both in BLED and APACS, two trials presented no mistakes on both groups. In particular, in APACS we noticed that such trials both included a word in the main text that was repeated on the punchline. Our hypothesis is that this may trigger a correct response in the informants with dyslexia. Studies conducted with clinical patients (Carotenuto et al. 2017) showed that these trials are poorly executed in subjects with pathological conditions. The data in figure 2 showed that the groups with dyslexia performed rather well on trials where humor was expressed through simple unambiguous jokes, but where a second reanalysis is required, subjects with dyslexia perform poorly, especially when the reanalysis concerns ambiguous lexical items or idiomatic expressions. Further problems were detected also when humor was grounded on the encyclopedic knowledge of the participants. Multiple regressions are intended to be used to investigate the effect of memory and verbal abilities on the perception of jokes and humorous texts. As this is a work in progress, we intend to give the English versions of APACS and BLED to L1 speakers of English with and without dyslexia. A contrastive kind of study could give us an insight on how language-based the inference process is, specifically on humour perception. Our findings seem to point to the necessity of either revising the existing tests or creating a new test for assessing humour comprehension in non-clinical subjects who show an impaired ability in performing the task. Ideally, the test should set up a scale of complexity of humour interpretazion ranging from cases based on lexical disambiguation alone (including shifts from idiomatic to literal meaning), to cases in which two or more inferential steps are necessary to reach the intended meaning. In the latter case, a qualitative parameter concerning the type of inferences involved seems to be required along with the quantitative parameter.

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Keywords: Dyslexia, Humor, pragmatics, Second Language Acquisition, English as a second language

Conference: XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference, Pavia, Italy, 30 May - 1 Jun, 2018.

Presentation Type: Poster or Oral

Topic: Experimental Pragmatics

Citation: Simi N (2018). APACS AND BLED SANTA LUCIA, TWO TESTS FOR ANALYZING THE PERCEPTION OF ITALIAN HUMOROUS JOKES IN SUBJECTS WITH AND WITHOUT DYSLEXIA.
. Front. Psychol. Conference Abstract: XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference. doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2018.73.00026

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Received: 04 May 2018; Published Online: 14 Dec 2018.

* Correspondence: Ms. Nicoletta Simi, Università degli Studi di Pisa, Pisa, Italy, nicoletta.simi@unipi.it