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Contextual Support for Less Salient Homophones and Pun Humor Appreciation: Evidence From Eye Movements in Reading Chinese Homophone Puns

Punning is an important means of creating humorous effects by intentionally exploiting semantic ambiguity. Previous psycholinguistic research on puns has mainly focused on the process of meaning retrieval in homograph puns, while it is still not entirely clear how readers dynamically utilize context...

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Autores principales: Zheng, Wei, Wang, Xiaolu
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9131095/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35645913
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.875479
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author Zheng, Wei
Wang, Xiaolu
author_facet Zheng, Wei
Wang, Xiaolu
author_sort Zheng, Wei
collection PubMed
description Punning is an important means of creating humorous effects by intentionally exploiting semantic ambiguity. Previous psycholinguistic research on puns has mainly focused on the process of meaning retrieval in homograph puns, while it is still not entirely clear how readers dynamically utilize contextual information to understand homophone puns. In the current investigation, 68 native Chinese participants were recruited to read three types of experimental sentences while their eye movements were recorded: (1) the homophone-pun sentences where the less salient homophone was visually presented, (2) the homophone-salient sentences where the salient homophone was used, and (3) the homophone-error sentences where the critical context noun in the homophone puns was replaced with an unrelated word. Humor rating results of the homophone puns and the homophone-salient sentences demonstrated that the less salient homophones rather than the salient ones elicited much larger humor responses when presented visually in the same potential pun context. In addition, the reverse fixation pattern in the homophone area and the spill-over region also suggested that meanings of the salient homophones were more recoverable even when not presented visually. Statistical analyses of the homophone puns and the homophone-error sentences showed that the semantic relatedness between the critical context noun and the less salient homophone could significantly predict the humor rating scores of Chinese readers. Taken together, less salient homophones need to receive more contextual support to balance out the advantages of salient homophones before generating a humorous pun interpretation.
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spelling pubmed-91310952022-05-26 Contextual Support for Less Salient Homophones and Pun Humor Appreciation: Evidence From Eye Movements in Reading Chinese Homophone Puns Zheng, Wei Wang, Xiaolu Front Psychol Psychology Punning is an important means of creating humorous effects by intentionally exploiting semantic ambiguity. Previous psycholinguistic research on puns has mainly focused on the process of meaning retrieval in homograph puns, while it is still not entirely clear how readers dynamically utilize contextual information to understand homophone puns. In the current investigation, 68 native Chinese participants were recruited to read three types of experimental sentences while their eye movements were recorded: (1) the homophone-pun sentences where the less salient homophone was visually presented, (2) the homophone-salient sentences where the salient homophone was used, and (3) the homophone-error sentences where the critical context noun in the homophone puns was replaced with an unrelated word. Humor rating results of the homophone puns and the homophone-salient sentences demonstrated that the less salient homophones rather than the salient ones elicited much larger humor responses when presented visually in the same potential pun context. In addition, the reverse fixation pattern in the homophone area and the spill-over region also suggested that meanings of the salient homophones were more recoverable even when not presented visually. Statistical analyses of the homophone puns and the homophone-error sentences showed that the semantic relatedness between the critical context noun and the less salient homophone could significantly predict the humor rating scores of Chinese readers. Taken together, less salient homophones need to receive more contextual support to balance out the advantages of salient homophones before generating a humorous pun interpretation. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-05-11 /pmc/articles/PMC9131095/ /pubmed/35645913 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.875479 Text en Copyright © 2022 Zheng and Wang. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Zheng, Wei
Wang, Xiaolu
Contextual Support for Less Salient Homophones and Pun Humor Appreciation: Evidence From Eye Movements in Reading Chinese Homophone Puns
title Contextual Support for Less Salient Homophones and Pun Humor Appreciation: Evidence From Eye Movements in Reading Chinese Homophone Puns
title_full Contextual Support for Less Salient Homophones and Pun Humor Appreciation: Evidence From Eye Movements in Reading Chinese Homophone Puns
title_fullStr Contextual Support for Less Salient Homophones and Pun Humor Appreciation: Evidence From Eye Movements in Reading Chinese Homophone Puns
title_full_unstemmed Contextual Support for Less Salient Homophones and Pun Humor Appreciation: Evidence From Eye Movements in Reading Chinese Homophone Puns
title_short Contextual Support for Less Salient Homophones and Pun Humor Appreciation: Evidence From Eye Movements in Reading Chinese Homophone Puns
title_sort contextual support for less salient homophones and pun humor appreciation: evidence from eye movements in reading chinese homophone puns
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9131095/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35645913
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.875479
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