THE TIME COURSE OF MEANING ACTIVATION IN JOKES: BILINGUALS VS. MONOLINGUALS

Yıl 2014, Cilt: 1 Sayı: 2 - Cilt: 1 Sayı: 2, 5 - 19, 04.06.2016

Metin Ozdemir Huseyin Uysal

Öz

Universality of humor has led to many studies aiming to explain the cognitive processes in the human mind. The acquisition processes of bilinguals and monolinguals differ, therefore it is common to observe differences in their cognitive structure, in terms of joke comprehension. It has been a matter of interest for linguists and psychologists how these differences vary in humor comprehension, which has always been a complex phenomenon. The present study investigates the differences between bilinguals and monolinguals while they process one-liners. Jokes can provide insight into how conceptual organization is shaped in bilingual’s mind, since joke processing involves combining linguistic elements in text with encyclopedic knowledge. To achieve this aim, eye movements of two different groups were analyzed while they were reading one-liner jokes and their non-joke counterparts. The analysis was carried out via fixation count and total fixation duration on punchlines. It has been observed, when the two groups are compared, that the bilinguals fixated longer on the punchlines and made more fixations than monolinguals and that bilinguals needed more cognitive resources in order to comprehend the jokes, suggesting that a bilingual’s lexical-conceptual store link may be different from that of a monolingual’s.

Anahtar Kelimeler

bilingualism, joke comprehension, eye-tracking, lexical and conceptual store.

Kaynakça

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