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

ABSTRACT: 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.

SUBMITTER: Zheng W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9131095 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature