Humor, Abstraction, and Disbelief

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 including mistakes, pretense, lying, false beliefs, and metaphors. In Study 2, 20 parents read a book containing humorous and non-humorous pages to their 19-to 26-month-olds. Parents used a significantly higher percentage of high abstraction extra-textual utterances (ETUs) when reading the humorous pages. In Study 3, 41 parents read either a humorous or non-humorous book to their 18-to 24-month-olds. Parents reading the humorous book made significantly more ETUs coded for a specific form of high abstraction: those encouraging disbelief of prior utterances. Sharing humorous books thus increases toddlers' exposure to high abstraction and belief-based language.