Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.