The goal of language learning should be to fit in with the language community, and this often requires much more than linguistic knowledge. Although both social wellness in a second language (L2) society and L2 humor comprehension require sophisticated social and cultural knowledge beyond linguistic proficiency, their direct association has not previously been tested. Here we developed a novel method to assess different stages of humor comprehension (i.e., detection and appreciation) and conducted a series of experiments to explore its relationship with subjective social well-being in non-native English speakers. The results revealed significant correlations between language anxiety and social connectedness with both humor detection and humor appreciation in the L2. The findings suggest that the ability of L2 humor detection can be a hallmark of pragmatic proficiency and social wellness in an L2 community.

Despite the universal phenomenon of humor across societies and communities, humor comprehension in second language (L2) speakers is often overlooked. It is unclear whether L2 speakers rely primarily on sociocultural proficiency or linguistic proficiency when they process humor in a foreign language. We conducted two experiments examining the direct association of sociocultural proficiency and linguistic proficiency in humor comprehension behaviors in the visual and auditory modalities. Across both modalities, results revealed a significant association of social connectedness with humor detection and appreciation in non-native speakers. Furthermore, individual differences in language proficiency and social connectedness were shown to be more relevant for humor ratings in the visual modality. The finding suggests that L2 speakers’ humor comprehension performance was related to sociocultural proficiency and integration with the L2 community.

Humor comprehension is a great challenge for foreign/second language (L2) learners. Previous studies on humor comprehension in L2 speakers have relied only on descriptive approaches or subjective ratings on humor materials. However, no study has quantitatively investigated the behavior of L2 speakers in different stages of humor comprehension including humor detection and appreciation. This study first developed/validated a novel method to separately assess joke detection and appreciation, and conducted a series of experiments to explore the difference between native and non-native English speakers. The results showed that the non-native speakers achieved significantly lower accuracy in the joke detection than the native speakers, whereas the appreciation ratings were comparable between them. The results suggested that the non-native speakers are not necessarily disadvantageous in the joke appreciation, but detection, compared with native speakers

Recent studies link surprisal —a measure of conditional probability of words in context—to the N400 component size in event-related potentials (ERP), supporting a role for predictive coding in language comprehension. An alternative account argues that N400 variations are better explained by a retrieval mechanism sensitive to the semantic similarity between a word and its preceding context. Because jokes often rely on the presence of unexpected words that relate to the prior context multiple ways, they afford observation of the relative importance of contextual predictability and contextual similarity. We employed state-of-the-art machine learning to assess the surprisal and contextual semantic similarity of critical words in jokes and control stimuli. Using regression models to predict ERP, we found contextual similarity best explains N400 and P600 responses, supporting the semantic similarity account. Additionally, jokes elicit enhanced N400 and P600 responses that go beyond that attributable to their surprisal and contextual semantic similarity.

Visual stimuli design plays an important role in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) based on visual evoked potentials (VEPs). Variations in stimulus parameters have been shown to affect both decoding accuracy and subjective perception experience, implying the need for a trade-off in design. In this study, we comprehensively and systematically compared various combinations of amplitude contrast and spectral content parameters in the stimulus design to quantify their impact on decoding performance and subject comfort. Specifically, three parameters were investigated: 1) contrast level, 2) temporal pattern (periodic steady-state or pseudo-random code-modulated), and 3) frequency range. We collected electroencephalogram (EEG) data and subjective perception ratings from ten subjects and evaluated the decoding accuracy and subject comfort rating for different combinations of the stimulus parameters. Our results indicate that while high-frequency steady-state VEP (SSVEP) stimuli were rated the most comfortable, they also had the lowest decoding accuracy. Conversely, low-frequency SSVEP stimuli were rated the least comfortable but had the highest decoding accuracy. Standard and high-frequency M-sequence code-modulated VEPs (c-VEPs) produced intermediates between the two. We observed a consistent trade-off relationship between decoding accuracy and subjective comfort level across all parameters. Based on our findings, we offer c-VEP as a preferable stimulus for achieving reliable decoding accuracy while maintaining a reasonable level of comfortability.