Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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