# Humour from 12 to 36 months: Insights into children's socio-cognitive and language development

Chiara Mazzocconi, Béatrice Priego-Valverde

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Chiara Mazzocconi, Béatrice Priego-Valverde. Humour from 12 to 36 months: Insights into children's socio-cognitive and language development. Infant Behavior and Development, 2025, 81, pp.102-129. 10.1016/j.infbeh.2025.102129. hal-05310263

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# Humour from 12 to 36 months: Insights into children's socio-cognitive and language development

Chiara Mazzocconi<sup>a,b,c ID,*</sup>, Béatrice Priego-Valverde<sup>a,c ID</sup>

## ARTICLE INFO

Dataset link: https://phon.talkbank.org/access/Eng-NA/Providence.html, https://osf.io/3b8uh/

**Keywords:**

Humour

Laughter

Socio-cognitive and language development

Incongruities and scripts

General Theory of Verbal Humor

Knowledge domains

## ABSTRACT

The relationship between laughter, humour, and socio-cognitive development in infants has attracted scholarly attention, yet structured longitudinal studies remain sparse. This study examines humour appreciation and production in four North American children from the Providence Corpus (Demuth et al., 2006). We annotated 30 min of naturalistic mother-child interactions at six-month intervals (12, 18, 24, 30, and 36 months). We identify 271 humorous episodes following two criteria (Archakis and Tsakona, 2005): (1) the presence of laughter and (2) the identification of an incongruity, i.e. *Script Opposition* (SO) (GTVH, Attardo (2001)). Each episode was analysed for SO type — im/possible, ab/normal, or non/actual— following Hempelmann and Ruch (2005) hierarchical framework. To explore the developmental relevance, we propose a classification of SOs by knowledge Domains: Natural World & Objects, Social-sphere, and Metalinguistic-sphere.

Findings reveal distinct SO and Domain distributions between mothers and children, developmental trajectories in SOs and Domains, and interactions between them. Between 12 and 30 months, children favoured humourous episodes involving multiple SOs, suggesting a need for multiple cues to interpret mothers' humorous intent, potentially influencing maternal behaviour. Notably, our results contribute, together with previous studies, in refining McGhee (1979) humour developmental stages, showing that some types of humour emerge earlier than previously postulated. This study provides a detailed investigation of humour in child development from 12 to 36 months, illustrating how humour production and perception reflect cognitive, pragmatic, and linguistic development and offer insights into children's knowledge acquisition — insights often challenging to access through experimental testing.

## 1. Introduction

One of the main challenges faced by scholars interested in child development is that, contrary to what can be done with adults, it is hard to ask children about their thoughts and judgements or to have direct information about their attentional, cognitive and emotional states. For that reason over the years outstanding researchers have proposed, tested and established several methodologies with the aim of overcoming these difficulties and having subtle insight into infants' attentional states, processing and competences: these include habituation procedures, intermodal preferential-look, preferential-listening, physiological and functional neuroimaging

<footnote><sup>a</sup> Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, Laboratoire Parole et Langage (UMR 7309), Institute Language Communication and the Brain, 5 Avenue Pasteur, 13100, Aix-en-Provence, France</footnote>

<footnote><sup>b</sup> Aix Marseille University, INSERM, INS, Inst Neurosci Syst, 27 Bd Jean Moulin, 13005, Marseille, France</footnote>

<footnote><sup>c</sup> Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, Laboratoire Parole et Langage (UMR 7309), 5 Avenue Pasteur, 13100, Aix-en-Provence, France</footnote>

<footnote>* Corresponding author.</footnote>

<footnote>E-mail addresses: chiara.mazzocconi@univ-amu.fr, chiara.mazzocconi@live.it (C. Mazzocconi), beatrice.priego-valverde@univ-amu.fr (B. Priego-Valverde).</footnote>
methods (Ambridge & Rowland, 2013). Many of these methodologies rely on behaviours that signal the child appreciation of a violation in a pattern or on the perception of an unpredicted event (e.g. suction speed, preferential and re-orienting look, MMN, N400). In the current paper, we will claim that also looking at child laughter in relation to humorous episodes in ecological settings can give us insight into many aspects of children cognitive, social and pragmatic development, indirectly unravelling information about their cognitive and socio-pragmatic development otherwise hardly accessible, especially in experimental conditions.

## 1.1. Why humour in early childhood?

Humour is inherently interactive (Haugh & Priego-Valverde, 2024; Maraev, Breitholtz, Howes, Larsson, & Cooper, 2021). From a pragmatic perspective, humour appreciation relies on shared knowledge, conventions, and cultural norms (Martin & Ford, 2018; Priego-Valverde, 2003), often losing its effect when abstracted from context (Attardo, 2020; Cunningham, 2005; Morreall, 2011). Humour frequently involves inferring the unsaid, considering others' mental states, and playing with expectations. Consequently, humour appreciation and production correlate with pragmatic and mentalizing abilities (Aykan & Nalçacı, 2018; Bischetti, Ceccato, Lecce, Cavallini, & Bambini, 2019).

Laughter is a highly multifunctional signal (Mazzocconi, Tian, & Ginzburg, 2020), which is not a necessary or sufficient condition for humour (Attardo, Eisterhold, Hay, & Poggi, 2003; Gironzetti, 2022). Nevertheless it can often be considered as a proxy of humour appreciation (Archakis & Tsakona, 2005) or as a cue of humorous intention (Attardo et al., 2003; Hoicka & Gattis, 2008). Corpus studies indicate that laughter is most commonly used to signal enjoyment, pleasant incongruities, and humour in social interactions (Mazzocconi, Maraev, & Ginzburg, 2018; Mazzocconi et al., 2020; Rychlowska, McKeown, Sneddon, & Curran, 2022; Szameitat, Szameitat, & Wildgruber, 2022; Wood, 2020).

Most scholars consider incongruity to be a central element of adult humour. Embracing cognitive models suggesting that people rely on mental structures, or frames, to organize and interpret information by categorizing experiences, guiding decisions, and shaping perceptions (Bottini & Doeller, 2020), incongruity can be understood as a clash between (at least) two frames (Yus, 2017). Other scholars have further formalized this conception of incongruity using frame-related concepts such as scripts, which represent structured sequences of expectations (Attardo & Raskin, 1991; Raskin, 1985), topoi: i.e. principles of reasoning recognized within a socio-cultural community in relation to a specific context (Ginzburg, Mazzocconi, & Tian, 2020a; Maraev et al., 2021) or, more broadly, structures of expectations (Tannen, 1993). These different approaches converge in explaining humour as emerging from the disruption or clash of anticipated patterns in thought and communication.

In child humour development literature, incongruity has been central since Piaget (1945). Appraising (and eventually enjoy) an incongruity entails the acquisition and knowledge of a typical pattern. Reddy, Williams, and Vaughan (2002) state that appreciation of humour emerges when newly discovered patterns and norms become the objects of violation and distortion in fun and interactive exploration. Humour appreciation, often expressed through laughter, reflects therefore what children are learning, and their current models, about their world and culture (Loizou & Recchia, 2019; Martin, 2007; Mireault & Reddy, 2016; Telli, 2023; Telli & Hoicka, 2022). Piaget (1945) linked laughter to cognitive mastery, where humour is appreciated most when involving concepts which are at the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1980). For instance, peek-a-boo is most enjoyed when a child has just grasped object permanence—otherwise, it may be upsetting (if not yet acquired) or boring (if acquired too long before) (Parrott & Gleitman, 1989). This applies similarly to principles of the physical world, cultural knowledge, and conversational conventions (Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2023; Mireault & Reddy, 2016). Understanding humour may be an early step in grasping that someone could intentionally “do the wrong thing” or mislead (Reddy, 1991), marking early pragmatically rich meanings, foundational for understanding teasing (Colle, Grosse, Behne, & Tomasello, 2023) and irony (Pexman, Zdrazililova, McConnachie, Deater-Deckard, & Petrill, 2009; Pouscoulous, 2023; Recchia, Howe, Ross, & Alexander, 2010). The fact that laughter production and use in relation to humorous episodes are tightly linked to pragmatic skills is also supported by studies showing atypical laughter and humour production and perception in neuro-different populations where pragmatic skills are characteristically divergent, including autism spectrum and schizophrenia (Emerich, Creaghead, Grether, Murray, & Grasha, 2003; Jones, 2009; Lavelle & McCabe, 2012; Ozonoff & Miller, 1996; Polimeni & Reiss, 2006b; Reddy et al., 2002; Samson, 2013; Silva, Da Fonseca, Esteves, & Deruelle, 2017; Weiss et al., 2013).

Investigating child humour in interaction is crucial, as humour positively impacts social development (Bureau et al., 2014), shared attention (Mireault et al., 2018), theory of mind (Mayes, Klin, & Cohen, 1994), and learning (Esseily, Rat-Fischer, Somogyi, O'Regan, & Fagard, 2016; Hoicka & Akhtar, 2012; Hoicka & Gattis, 2008; Telli, 2023; Telli & Hoicka, 2022). While some cross-sectional studies with a developmental focus exist (e.g., Hoicka & Akhtar, 2012; Hoicka et al., 2022; Telli & Hoicka, 2022), research employing structured longitudinal designs that follow the same group of children over time remains relatively limited. Cross-sectional designs, though valuable for capturing age-related trends, do not allow for the examination of within-child developmental trajectories. In contrast, longitudinal approaches offer deeper insights into individual change and continuity but are more methodologically demanding. Notable exceptions include the qualitative observational studies by Del Ré, Dodane, Morgenstern, and Vieira (2020), Morgenstern, Dodane, and Leroy-Collombel (2023), as well as early case studies such as those by Johnson and Mervis (1997), Dubois, Farmer, and Farmer (1984).

## 1.2. How can we study humour?

### 1.2.1. A script-based approach to the study of humour in adults

The study of adult humour dates back millennia, at least to Aristotle (McKeon et al., 2009). One of the most established frameworks for analysing adult humour is the *General Theory of Verbal Humor* (GTVH; Attardo 2001), originally derived from the
Semantic Script Theory of Humor (Raskin, 1985, 1987). While initially focused on written or scripted humour (e.g., jokes), the GTVH has since been adapted for conversational humour (Antonopoulou & Sifianou, 2003; Archakis & Tsakona, 2005; Attardo, 2017; Lugea & Walker, 2023; Ortega, 2015; Tsakona, 2020). This framework distinguishes various elements of analysis (Knowledge Resources) and characterizes the incongruities involved. The Knowledge Resources include:

1. Script Opposition (SO): Opposing scripts generate incongruity, based on Raskin's Script-Based Semantic Theory. SOs are classified into three types: (1) Possible/Impossible, (2) Normal/Abnormal, and (3) Actual/Non-Actual (see Hempelmann and Ruch 2005 for detailed discussion and Section 3.5 for definitions and examples).

2. Logical Mechanism: The distorted, playful logic underlying the SO, partially resolving it in a non-serious manner, though not always required (e.g., absurd humour). Examples include analogy, role reversal, and parallelism (see Attardo 2001, p. 27, Attardo, Hempelmann, and Di Maio 2002 and Hempelmann and Attardo 2011).

3. Situation: The setting and context needed to appreciate humour, defined by Attardo (2017) as the macro-script describing the background of events.

4. Target: The person, people, or event being ridiculed.

5. Narrative Strategy: The format of the joke (e.g., narrative, dialogue, riddle) and structure of speech acts, distinguishing genres of verbal humour.

6. Language: The linguistic elements and their sequential ordering and arrangement essential for the joke's execution.

Applying this framework enables systematic comparisons of jokes, revealing similarities, complexities, and contextual uses (Hempelmann & Ruch, 2005). Although termed a "general theory", the GTVH was initially designed for canned jokes, i.e. written and scripted humour. Thus, scholars expanded it for conversational humour by adding two additional resources (Tsakona, 2020):

7. Meta-Knowledge: Signals of the speaker's humorous intent and the hearer's recognition of it (Canestrari et al., 2010).

8. Context: Sociocultural presuppositions and metapragmatic stereotypes, accounting for differing responses to humour (Tsakona, 2013, 2017).

### 1.2.2. Humour studies in children

Child humour studies have mainly relied on qualitative descriptions of humorous episodes (Del Ré, Dodane, & Morgenstern, 2014; Del Ré et al., 2020; Morgenstern et al., 2023) or on classifying episodes with often idiosyncratic taxonomies, focusing on context or the "object" involved. Below, we review some classification systems used by researchers.

Sroufe and Wunsch (1972) tested infants under one year with potentially humorous stimuli, finding that older infants showed more laughter and smiling responses: auditory and tactile stimuli elicited laughter at 3-4 months, visual stimuli at 5 months, and social games, inappropriateness, and incongruous acts at 7-9 months. However, these stimuli were confounded by factors like multimodal aspects (e.g., lip-popping as auditory but also visual) and crucially all of them involved social interaction by default, being presented by the caregiver.

Horgan (1981) offered one of the first interaction-based characterizations, observing a child from ages 1 to 4. Humour complexity grew with cognitive and metalinguistic abilities, progressing from semantic violations and phonological games to riddles, aligning with Piagetian stages (Piaget, 1977). This pattern was corroborated by Cameron, Kennedy, and Cameron (2008), Johnson and Mervis (1997).

In the seminal work on infant clowning between 7 and 9 months, Reddy (1991) classified instances of child attempts at making others laugh into: Odd body movements, Odd facial expressions, Odd sounds, Odd self decorations, Extreme actions (e.g. raspberry), Absurd actions, Exposing hidden body parts, Violating social norms, Destroying others' constructions, Imitating others' odd actions, Acting regressive (e.g. spitting food or water). This study highlighted that infant humour shares features with adult clowning and how cognitive, social and emotional factors are highly intertwined in infants' attempts at eliciting adult laughter.

Loizou (2005) examined humour in 15- to 22-month-olds, classifying episodes by context or content (games, rule-breaking, incongruities, success, pretend play). The authors conclude that there are two factors that best describe young children's humorous behaviour, namely the detection or appreciation of incongruities and the empowerment of asserting themselves within their social environment (especially violating adult expectations in the context of teasing).

Hoicka and Akhtar (2012) categorized 2- and 3-year-olds' humour as object-based, label-based, conceptual-based, peekaboo/hide and seek, tickling/chasing, funny bodily actions and taboo topics. They showed that both 2- and 3-year-olds tend to cue multimodally humorous intentions (with gaze, smile, and laughter) and that while humorous episodes produced by 2-year-olds comprise an equal amount of copied or novel actions, by three-year-olds they produce mainly novel and original humour. Concerning the type of humour produced, they observed that three-year-olds were significantly more likely to produce conceptual humour than 2-year-olds, and there was a tendency for 3-year-olds to produce more label-based humour than 2-year-olds.

Coates and Coates (2019) examined peer humour in 4- to 7-year-olds, classifying episodes as: (1) preposterous statements, exaggerations, anecdotes, (2) jokes, (3) singing and chanting, playing with words, rhyming, repeating, (4) bodily functions, body parts and nakedness, and (5) narrative humour in drawings. They linked humour development to increasing ability to manipulate language and with a deeper cultural understanding.

James and Tager-Flusberg (1994) compared humour production in autistic and Down Syndrome children (3-7 years), applying the classification proposed in Reddy (1991): tickling, routines, slapstick, sounds, teasing. The autistic children produced significantly less humour overall and less humour involving nonverbal incongruity.
Recent work by Hoicka et al. (2022) further advances the field with the development of the Early Humour Survey (EHS), a parent-report tool that captures the emergence and trajectory of 21 different types of humour previously described in the literature in children aged 1 to 47 months. While not a theoretical classification system per se, the EHS offers valuable empirical data on the relative timing and frequency of various humour types, contributing a broad, developmentally sensitive picture that complements existing observational and theory-driven frameworks.

This brief review shows that classifications of infant and child humour vary widely across studies and age groups, differing significantly from those used in adult studies. As a result, a developmental perspective from infanthood to adulthood is currently lacking due to substantial methodological disparities, which pose challenges to a comprehensive understanding of humour development across the life-span.

Moreover, while the studies mentioned above—including those analysing spontaneous interactions—have focused primarily on humour appreciated or produced by children, the behaviour of the interactant (most often the caregiver) has typically been considered only in limited ways. Specifically, caregivers’ responses have been examined either as reactions to the child’s humour production or to determine whether the child’s humour involved repetition or variations of humourous actions previously produced by the adult (e.g., Hoicka and Akhtar 2012 looked at whether the humorous action produced by children were repetition or variation of humorous actions previously performed by the caregiver during the course of 10 min interactions). Although several studies on laughter vocalizations in early interactions—not specifically focused on humour—have examined both caregiver and infant behaviour (Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2022, 2023; Nwokah & Fogel, 1993; Nwokah, Hsu, Dobrowolska, & Fogel, 1994), little research to date has explored caregivers’ own laughter specifically in relation to humorous episodes during interactions with their children. This leaves a gap in the literature, as a more comprehensive account of humour development should acknowledge that interaction—and development more broadly—is a dynamic, co-constructed process (e.g., Fogel 1993, Lewis 2011, Molenaar, Lerner, and Newell 2013, Stern 1985, Thelen and Smith 1994). This perspective is particularly relevant given evidence from previous work (e.g., Mireault et al. 2018, 2015) showing that infants’ appraisal of humorous events is shaped by the caregiver’s emotional responses from the earliest months of life. Conversely, children’s behaviour—particularly their responsiveness and the production of socially rewarding signals such as laughter—also plays a key role in shaping caregiver input. This reciprocal dynamic supports the view that children are active participants in their own development, eliciting behaviours from adults that are well-suited to their current developmental needs (Begus & Southgate, 2018; Spencer, Perone, & Buss, 2011; Tamis-LeMonda, Kuchirko, & Suh, 2018).

## 2. Current study

Our literature review highlights that humour appreciation and production are closely linked to children’s socio-cognitive, linguistic, and pragmatic development. Nevertheless, structured studies examining humour development in interaction longitudinally in the same children are lacking, as well as an investigation of humour development taking into account also the humour appreciation and production of the caregiver. Moreover, integrating insights from both developmental and adult studies remains challenging due to the different methodologies employed across the life-span. This study addresses these gaps by investigating humour appreciation and production in mother-child interactions from 12 to 36 months, aiming to reveal insights into cognitive and pragmatic development. We apply resources from the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo & Raskin, 1991), a rigorous framework widely used in adult verbal humour studies, to the study of mother-child multimodal interactions, expanding therefore its scope to include non-verbal elements. Our primary focus is on analysing the incongruities (Script Opposities, SOs) present in humorous episodes. To gain further insight into cognitive, pragmatic, and linguistic development, we propose a new classification to categorize SOs according to Knowledge Domains, enabling a detailed examination of which SO types are recognized by children and mothers across knowledge areas, at what developmental stage, and whether they first appear in perception or production. Notably, we account for the possibility that a single humorous episode involves multiple sources of incongruity, unlike previous mutually exclusive classifications of child humour, applying a methodology more similar to those employed in adult humour research (e.g., Archakis and Tsakona 2005). We analyse only those humorous episodes accompanied by laughter by either of the participants involved in the interaction. We will therefore leave aside a study of smiling in relation to humorous episodes or the study of humorous episodes not accompanied by laughter.<fnref n="1" /> The discussion will be based on a quantitative analysis of annotated data, supported by qualitative descriptions of specific interactions, to examine humour development over time in mother-child interactions and explore how it reflects the child’s socio-pragmatic and cognitive growth and their emerging reasoning principles.

## 3. Method

### 3.1. *The corpus*

Our dataset comprises audio-video recorded mother-child interactions from the Providence Corpus (Demuth, Culbertson, & Alter, 2006), selected for its longitudinal and multimodal (audio and video) data. Access to multimodal recordings was essential for our

<footnote n="1">¹ While we recognize the value of examining both smiling and laughter in relation to humorous episodes, a micro-coding analysis of facial expressions was not feasible for the current study. The ecological nature of our data introduced practical limitations: the home recordings were captured using a fixed camera, which sometimes results in the child's or caregiver's face being out of view (e.g., when one has their back to the camera). In such cases, laughter can still be reliably identified through audio and body movement, whereas smiling would be far more difficult to detect consistently, compromising both annotation reliability and subsequent statistical analyses.</footnote>
study, as it allowed us to identify and analyse the context of laughter and humorous episodes in detail. This multimodal approach was especially important in the early stages of observation, where children's speech was still developing and much of the interaction was non-verbally mediated.

The Providence Corpus was compiled between 2002 and 2005, collecting data from participants in Southern New England. It contains longitudinal audio/video recordings of spontaneous interactions at home between six monolingual English-speaking mothers and their children, from approximately 1 to 3 years of age. The participants include three boys (Alex, Ethan, William) and three girls (Lily, Naima, Violet), each recorded for approximately one hour every two weeks. Recording sessions began around the child's first year or when the parent reported that the child was producing about four words. Digital recordings took place in each child's home.<fnref n="2" />

## 3.2. Our data

Our study focuses on a subset of the Providence Corpus (Demuth et al., 2006), examining the longitudinal development of humour production and appreciation in four children: Alex, Lily, Naima, and William. Our sample size is based on prior studies of laughter using the same corpus (Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2022, 2023). Specifically, as in Mazzocconi and Ginzburg (2022, 2023), we analysed four out of the six children longitudinally recorded in the Providence corpus (see Section 3.1): Ethan was excluded due to a lack of available videos following a later diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome, and Violet was excluded randomly to maintain gender balance (two female and two male subjects). The sample size is inherently constrained by data availability and the labour-intensive nature of the detailed analyses employed, which currently require manual annotations. Notably, previous longitudinal studies on child humour following the same children through development in naturalistic settings have also worked with similar or smaller sample sizes: one child in Horgan (1981), Johnson and Mervis (1997), Dubois et al. (1984) and Cameron et al. (2008), two in Del Ré et al. (2014, 2020), and two in Morgenstern et al. (2023). We analysed 30 min segments of spontaneous mother–child interactions at 6-month intervals from 12³ to 36 months, yielding five time points per child (see Table A.2 in Appendix A for details), with 287 laughs identified in previous work by Mazzocconi and Ginzburg (2022).<fnref n="4" /> In order to avoid selection bias, each 30 min annotation began at the start of the recording session. Segments lacking interaction (e.g., when mother and child were in different rooms) or where both were not visible for extended periods were excluded from analysis.<fnref n="5" />

We were particularly interested in the age range between 12 and 36 months, as this period represents a critical window of rapid socio-cognitive and pragmatic development. We were fascinated to explore whether these rapid developmental changes would be reflected in the types of humour episodes children produce and appreciate—thus potentially offering support for Piaget (1945)'s idea that laughter, particularly in response to humour, can serve as a marker of socio-cognitive mastery. Notably, this developmental window encompasses substantial and steep progress across all levels of language (phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics), alongside the emergence of increasingly complex symbolic and pretend play around 18 months—which is a key component of humour, as it reflects growing symbol-referent flexibility. Moreover, children in this age range become increasingly socially motivated, developing a sense of self and an awareness of their reputation, which greatly influences social dynamics. We were especially intrigued by the opportunity to explore humour beginning with minimally verbal children (around 12 months, when each child was reported to produce about four words) through to richly verbal children around 36 months. We were indeed particularly interested in investigating whether humour appreciation and production may be informative about competences potentially inaccessible and hard to test in structured tasks, providing a unique window into early socio-cognitive development.

## 3.3. Laughter and laughable annotations

All annotations were conducted in ELAN (Brugman & Russel, 2004), using publicly available laughter annotations (Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2022) accessible at https://osf.io/48fmd/. Laughter identification guidelines can be found at https://osf.io/s5xj9. In total, 287 laughs were annotated. Additionally, we included annotations for *laughables* (events or states associated with laughter) from Mazzocconi and Ginzburg (2023), available at https://osf.io/mb297.

Following Ginzburg, Mazzocconi, and Tian (2020b) and Mazzocconi et al. (2020), we conceptualize laughter as an event predicate with two dimensions: the laughable and arousal. The *laughable* refers to the entity the laughter predicates about, which need not be inherently humorous (Glenn, 2003). Laughables are classified by presence of incongruity and incongruity types (Mazzocconi et al., 2020):

1. Pleasant incongruity: A clash with background information perceived as witty or rewarding, including jokes, puns, and conversational humour. This encompasses both intentional and unintentional humour (McGhee, 1979, p.7).

<footnote n="2">² All interactions are orthographically transcribed following CHAT conventions (see MacWhinney 2000). Transcriptions of mothers' and children's speech, along with audio/video files, are accessible via the CHILDES database at https://phon.talkbank.org/access/Eng-NA/Providence.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Choosing to work on the Providence Corpus entails that we do not capture the earliest humorous episodes occurring already within the first year of life (Mireault et al., 2012; Mireault & Reddy, 2016; Reddy, 1991).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Data available at https://osf.io/48fmd/ and https://osf.io/mb297.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ For these reasons, we supplemented two recordings (Lily and Naima at 36 months) with the nearest available video, summing durations and humour episodes analysed (see Table A.2).</footnote>
2. Social incongruity: A clash between social norms and/or comfort and the current situation: e.g. embarrassment or awkwardness, violation, invasion of another's space, asking a favour, or behaviour that conflicts with social expectations such as providing dispreferred answers.

3. Pragmatic incongruity: A mismatch between literal expression and intended meaning: e.g. irony, hyperbole, or scare-quoting. In such cases, laughter is used by the speaker in order to signal to the interlocutor the need to consider a less probable meaning.<fnref n="6" />

4. Pleasantness: Instances without incongruity, often reflecting closeness or warmth towards the interlocutor, such as during expressions of gratitude or affectionate gestures.

### 3.4. Humour episodes identification

To identify humorous episodes, we apply the methodology used by Archakis and Tsakona (2005), Tsakona (2020) in adult conversation, based on two fundamental criteria: (1) the presence of laughter and (2) the identification of an incongruity perceived or marked as pleasant (i.e. *Pleasant Incongruity* in Mazzocconi et al., 2020). This approach is applied equally to both children and mothers. Building on Mazzocconi and Ginzburg (2023)'s analysis, we further classify *Pleasant Incongruity laughables*. Of the 287 laughs annotated by Mazzocconi and Ginzburg (2023), 271 were coded as related to Pleasant Incongruity. Our study thus analyses these 271 humorous episodes: 113 are associated with child laughter and 158 with mothers' laughter.<fnref n="7" />

It is important to acknowledge some caveats in this methodology. As discussed in Section 1.1, laughter may occur without humour, and vice versa (Attardo, Pickering, & Baker, 2011; Gironzetti, 2022; Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1974). Our methodology therefore may cause us to overlook some humorous episodes; however, we can be more confident that the ones we analysed were appreciated/intended as humorous (Archakis & Tsakona, 2005). Moreover, when analysing child laughter, annotations reflect (inevitably) the adult annotator's perspective in assessing laughables, as objectively as possible, based on Script Opposition and Domain categories (described below Section 3.5). As external observers, we cannot be certain that an infant has recognized, understood, and appreciated a humorous episode (Hay, 2001). As Bell (2015) notes, these stages are not necessarily sequential or scalar—interlocutors may express appreciation for an attempt at humour even without fully understanding it. In line with our working assumption, we treat laughter as an expression of either perceived incongruity and/or enjoyment. However, in the context of the present empirical study, we are unable to assess the underlying understanding or the authenticity of the enjoyment expressed. Our analysis is therefore limited to observable expressions of enjoyment in relation to specific events. While it is possible for a child to laugh in response to a caregiver's laughter without fully grasping its argument, previous research suggests that this responsiveness to the caregiver's laughter increases over time (Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2022). Moreover, even when children may not share the adult's appraisal or fully comprehend the humorous episode, they seem to need to at least identify the object of the caregiver's laughter. For instance Mazzocconi and Ginzburg (2023) observed that when adult laughter is related to content that is too complex for the child to even identify (let alone understand or appreciate), the child typically does not laugh in response.

We do not consider the intentionality behind humorous episodes, in contrast to studies like Del Ré et al. (2014) and James and Tager-Flusberg (1994). We believe that, regardless of intent, the appraisal of a pleasant incongruity can offer insights into children's socio-cognitive development and their environmental feedback, even for unintentional actions. For instance, a child might laugh signalling humour appreciation of a mother's action even if it was performed without the intention to amuse the kid (e.g., blowing her nose); this laughter can nevertheless tell us a lot about what the baby is learning about the world in a specific developmental stage (e.g. having learnt typical human sound production). Conversely, the adult humorous appreciation of some actions produced by the child, without the intention of being amusing for the adult, can teach a lot to the child and influence his/her current and future behaviour and humour production (Mireault et al., 2014; Reddy, 2001). For instance, if a mother laughs when her child puts a shoe on their head, the child may learn: (1) their action caused an emotional reaction in the caregiver; (2) placing a shoe on the head is unusual or socially non-normative; and (3) such an act might be used in future to elicit amusement in others—thus supporting both learning and socio-cognitive prediction of others' mental states in the future.<fnref n="8" />

### 3.5. Humour episodes annotations

For each laughter instance associated with a humour episode (identified as Pleasant Incongruity in Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2023), we provided an additional characterization.

#### 3.5.1. Origin/producer of the humour episode

For all laughables classified as Pleasant Incongruity, we annotated the source of the humorous episode, specifying whether the laughable was produced by the laughter themselves (*self*), by the other participant (*partner*), by an external source unrelated to the conversation (e.g., an unusual noise from the next room or a toy) (*external*), or collaboratively constructed by both conversational partners (e.g., an identical utterance spoken simultaneously) (*collaborative*).

<footnote n="6">⁶ In Mazzocconi and Ginzburg (2023), Mazzocconi et al. (2020) this class focuses on non-literal language and excludes phenomena like physical play or role-play.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ All annotations are publicly available at https://osf.io/3b8uh/.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ We use the term *Social Cognition* to refer to a broad set of cognitive processes that extend beyond the attribution of mental states (e.g., false beliefs, intentions, emotions), though these remain foundational. Our definition aligns with Ostrom (1984)'s early view of social cognition as “the struggle to understand the interdependence between cognition and social behaviour” (p. 2), and with Fiske and Taylor (2020), Moskowitz (2024) account of how cognitive processes shape, and are shaped by, our understanding of the social world.</footnote>
### 3.5.2. Script opposition

The General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo & Raskin, 1991), an extension of the Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (Raskin, 1985), identifies a fundamental element of humour as the overlap or opposition between two scripts (Script Opposition). Here, a script refers to a sequence of events evoked by specific word meanings (Attardo, 2014). Subsequent studies have applied this framework to analyse conversational humour (e.g., Archakis & Tsakona, 2005). In the present study, we extend this approach to analyse humorous episodes that may include not only verbal elements but also nonverbal ones, such as actions, gestures, and facial expressions.

Three main types of SO are described:

1. Possible/Impossible: when the clash/overlap between the two scripts is related to the plausibility/impossibility of one of the two evoked scripts. For example in the following joke reported in Raskin (1985):

> Nurse: "That's a pretty bad cold you have, sir. What are you taking for it?"
> Patient: "Make me an offer!" (Spalding, 1976, 225)
> The possible activated script is "The patient has an illness", which clashes with an impossible one "The patient sells an illness".

2. Normal/Abnormal: when the overlap/clash is between a typical script and an atypical one. As in the following joke from Raskin (1985):

> A doctor tells a woman, "Your husband must have absolute rest. Here is a sleeping tablet". "When do I give it to him", she asks.
> "You don't", explains the doctor.

> Here a typical script "A doctor prescribes some medicine to the sick person" clashes with a very atypical one where "The doctor prescribes some medicine to the sick person's wife".

3. Actual/Non-Actual: when the overlap/clash is between two possible and typical scripts, and the incongruity relies in having considered one instead of the other and in the need to suddenly switch between the two. An example in following joke:

> "Does the accused have anything else to offer in his defence?"
> "No, your Honor, I've already given everything I own to my lawyer
> and a couple of jurors, who are friends of his."

> Here the actual script "The judge wants more legal arguments" is clashing with the one (non-actual) considered by the joke character "The judge invites for more bribing", which is sadly possible and not a such atypical procedure.

To guide SO annotation, we followed the hierarchical, stepwise approach proposed by Hempelmann and Ruch (2005), which relies on the conceptual hierarchy among the three SO types. The annotator first assessed whether the SO was of the im/possible type, then considered ab/normal, and finally non/actual. Impossibility implies abnormality, whereas an actual-non-actual clash requires both elements to be "normal" within their respective contexts.

It is important to note that a single humorous episode may involve multiple Script Oppositions (SOs) linked to different aspects of the episode. For instance, the concepts evoked might create a clash between possible and impossible scripts, while the tone of voice could introduce an appraisal of normal versus abnormal. Consequently, the classification of SOs within a humour episode is not intended to be mutually exclusive.

Below we present some examples and refer to extracts present in the rest of the manuscript to illustrate how we translated these three categories of SOs to our infant data.

The Possible/Impossible script opposition is often linked to pretence—for example, when a child uses a blanket to pretend to be a ghost. In this case, the possible script (1) "I am a human with a blanket over my face" contrasts with the impossible script (2) "I am a ghost." (see also Extract (6)).

In Extract 4, we see an example of the SO Normal/Abnormal opposition, where the conflicting scripts appear to be (1) "Shoes go on feet" (normal) and (2) "Shoes go on the head" (abnormal). While both scripts are conceivable and potentially observable, the first represents a normative state of affairs, whereas the second is distinctly atypical. (See also extract 5).

The clash Actual/Non-Actual in children seem to be often related to sudden insight. An example of the Actual/Non-Actual SO is observed during a drawing-guessing game in which the mother was drawing images on a whiteboard and Alex had to guess what she was depicting. Initially, the child thought it was a face and tried to interpret the expression. Suddenly, he realized it was actually an apple and, laughing, exclaimed, "It's an apple!" Here, the Actual script "Mum is drawing an apple" clashes with the Non-Actual script "Mum is drawing a face". The child's amusement seems to stem from the unexpected need to shift between the two scripts. Another example, this time from the mother's perspective, occurs during an alphabet game. As she says, "I for...," the child suddenly shouts, "Mummyyy!" In this moment, the mother is confronted with an unexpected shift from the Non-Actual script—"We say words that begin with the letter we mention"—to the child's Actual script: "We dedicate the letter to someone we love". The child's interpretation playfully reconfigures the game's logic, adding an affectionate and surprising twist.

### 3.5.3. Knowledge domains

To gain specific insight into what is appraised as humorous in mother-child interactions over time, we further annotated each identified SO with its pertaining Knowledge Domain and sub-domain:

* Natural World & Objects<fnref n="9" />:

<footnote n="9">⁹ Humour based on violations of intuitive physics, biology, or conventional object properties or function (cf. McGhee, 1977, 1979; Spelke, 1994; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007).</footnote>
- Human Scheme: Clashes with typical human traits, physically or functionally (e.g., grimace, odd voice, unusual movement).

- Physical Laws: Violations of known physical laws and intuitive physics (e.g., an object in water remains dry, pigs flying).

- Object Use and Properties: Deviations from usual object functions or characteristics (e.g., shoes on the head, talking objects, a hard pillow).

• Social-sphere (Social Conventions)<fnref n="10" />:

- Social Routines: Deviations from typical course of sequential actions (e.g., the birthday celebrant running away instead of blowing candles).

- Moral Rules: Violations of cultural conduct codes (e.g., biting, screaming).

- Conversational Rules: Violation of the typical unfolding of a dialogue (e.g., ignoring a question, abrupt topic shifts, perfect overlapping speech in form and content from different interlocutors, repeating the same contribution or concept over and over, etc.).

• Metalinguistic-sphere<fnref n="11" />:

- Phonetics: Deviations in vocal characteristics specific to the individual (e.g., unusually high pitch, roughness, or intensity).

- Phonology: Alterations of phonological structure (e.g., “car” → “bar”, rhyming).

- Semantics: Violations of expected meanings (e.g., “bird” instead of “dog”, “preparing coffee in the bathroom”).

- Less Probable Meaning (Pragmatics): Clashes between literal and intended meaning (e.g., irony, scare quoting, hyperbole).<fnref n="12" />

Each humour episode can involve more than one Knowledge Domain (as specified for SOs). For example, the same episode can involve a SO related to the Natural World & Objects knowledge while at the same time involving another SO related to the Metalinguistic domain. The classification of Domains and sub-domains is therefore not intended to be mutually exclusive for each humour episode and is applied to each SO identified.

This tripartite division draws from developmental and cognitive literature, while aiming to integrate previous insights from the humour developmental literature: from sensorimotor and object-based humour (e.g., putting shoes on the head), to social transgressions (e.g., pretending to misbehave), to language-based humour (e.g., misnaming, rhymes, puns). While building on previous research in humour development, our classification departs from some earlier approaches in several key ways. First, unlike classifications that group humorous episodes based on the sensory modality involved (e.g., Sroufe and Wunsch 1972, who distinguish tactile, visual, auditory, and social stimuli), our framework does not rely on the sensory channels through which humour is perceived. Second, rather than focusing on the specific actions that elicit humour—as richly described, for example, in Hoicka et al. (2022), Reddy (2001)—our classification aims to organize humorous episodes according to the underlying knowledge domains they engage. Third, we do not focus exclusively on verbal humour development (e.g. Johnson and Mervis 1997), but try to capture both verbal and non-verbal humour in line with most recent literature (e.g. Hoicka et al. 2022, Telli and Hoicka 2022). This approach seeks to offer a more general, conceptually driven understanding of the types of humour children and caregivers produce and appreciate.

It is important to specify that the grouping we propose refers to conceptual domains rather than the mechanisms of learning. For example, a child may learn through social interaction that a pillow is soft—but a “hard pillow” would still violate expectations about physical properties, not interpersonal behaviour. Similarly, “a pig flying” is funny not because of a social norm violation, but because it clashes with intuitive physics, even though a child learns about flying and pigs through culture.

The procedure for the calculation of inter-annotator agreement and the results are reported in Section 4.1.

NOTE: In conversation extracts, laughter will be transcribed following the annotation guidelines from Hough et al. (2016): (laughter/) tags standalone laughter not overlapping with speech (e.g., “that’s cool (laughter/)” ) while (laughter) (/laughter) tags laughter overlapping with speech, speech-laughter (e.g., “(laughter)yeah(/laughter)”). Recognizing that written examples lack the rich prosodic and multimodal cues essential for pragmatic interpretation, we provide hyperlinks to video clips of the original recordings for each interaction excerpt. A full list of available video clips is included in Appendix D.

4. Results

All statistical analyses were conducted using R (version 4.2.2) (R. Core Team, 2022).

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Humour stemming from disrupted routines, rule-breaking, or social incongruity (cf. Dunn 1988, Mireault et al. 2012, Reddy 2001, Turiel 2022, Vaish and Tomasello 2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Humour involving linguistic form or meaning, including phonological play, semantic violations, and pragmatic mismatch (cf. Angeleri and Airenti 2014, Hoff 2014, Hoicka and Akhtar 2012, Johnson and Mervis 1997, McGhee 1977, Pexman, Glenwright, Krol, and James 2005, Saxton 2017).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Here, *Pragmatics* narrowly refers to literal meaning-intent clashes, distinct from *Conversational Rules* in the Social-sphere domain.</footnote>
<table><caption>**Table 1**
Inter-coder annotation agreement SOs and Domains.</caption><thead><tr><td>Feature</td><td>% Agreement (2 coders)</td><td>Krippendorff's α</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Domain - Natural World &amp; Objects</td><td>91.52</td><td>0.83</td></tr><tr><td>Domain - Social Convention</td><td>84.45</td><td>0.64</td></tr><tr><td>Domain - Meta-Linguistic</td><td>94.35</td><td>0.88</td></tr><tr><td>SO - Normal/Abnormal</td><td>91.87</td><td>0.78</td></tr><tr><td>SO - Possible/Impossible</td><td>94.35</td><td>0.82</td></tr><tr><td>SO - Actual/Non-Actual</td><td>92.23</td><td>0.78</td></tr><tr><td>Overall</td><td>91.46</td><td>0.79</td></tr></tbody></table>

## 4.1. Inter-annotator agreement (IAA)

Our analysis on humorous episodes builds on the laughter annotations performed and publicly shared in Mazzocconi and Ginzburg (2022). Agreement on laughter identification and segmentation (start-time and end time boundaries) had been assessed on 18% of the corpus among 3 coders (the first author and 2 graduate students naive to the study hypotheses) using the Staccato algorithm implemented in ELAN (Lücking, Ptock, & Bergmann, 2011). The analysis was run with 1000 Monte Carlo Simulations, a granularity of 10 for annotation length, and a significance level of 0.05. The average degree of organization between the three annotators is 0.70.<fnref n="13" />

For humour episodes annotations, we built on the laughter annotations from Mazzocconi and Ginzburg (2022) and focused exclusively on the laughs annotated as *Pleasant Incongruity* in Mazzocconi and Ginzburg (2023) (see Section 3.4 for details). The first author fully annotated the corpus for humorous episodes. To assess inter-annotator agreement, we conducted a two-step process with a graduate student as the second annotator. The second annotator was unfamiliar with the study hypotheses, and began coding after training on the implemented classification scheme. The first step was aimed at testing agreement on humour episodes identification, while the second on Script Opposition (SO) and Domain classification. In the first phase, the second annotator analysed 20 randomly selected videoclips (approximately 2 min each, 5 per child across different time-points), each containing at least one instance of laughter. The annotator marked the start and end times for each *laughable* related to a Pleasant Incongruity (see Section 3.3). Agreement on identifying and segmenting humorous laughables (start and end boundaries) was assessed using the Staccato algorithm in ELAN (Lücking et al., 2011) with 1000 Monte Carlo simulations, 10 granularity for annotation length, and α = 0.05. The organization degree was 0.74, with a 93.6% raw agreement on humour classification for each laugh (n=47), noting three disagreements. In the second phase, the second annotator classified all the 271 laughables annotated by the first annotator for both children and mothers in terms of Script Opposition (SO) and Domain. An *Other* category was provided to avoid forced choices. Agreement results for each variable, including percentage agreement and Krippendorff's α (Krippendorff, 2012), are presented in Table 1.<fnref n="14" /> We observed 90.1% agreement (±5.09) with a Krippendorff's α of 0.78 for Domain, and 92.8% agreement (±1.33) with a Krippendorff's α of 0.79 for SO. Agreement on sub-domains was 95.4% with a Krippendorff's α of 0.82. We then examined agreement on Script Opposition within each sub-domain (see Table B.3 in Appendix), finding an overall agreement of 91.9% (±2.1) and a Krippendorff's α of 0.77. It should be noted that for *Social Convention* we observe a lower value of agreement than for other Domains (Krippendorff's α of 0.64). Looking at disagreements in detail, this is mainly due to cases where one annotator coded for more than one SOs, while the second annotator coded only for one category (See Appendix B.2 for examples of disagreements). Following discussion, annotators reached unanimous agreement, and these final values were used in the analyses reported in the manuscript.

## 4.2. Humour episodes perception and production

Out of 271 laughs related to humorous episodes, 113 were produced by children and 158 from mothers. In a few cases, details of the humour episodes were not visible to annotators (coded as *Not Visible* in Fig. 1): 10 instances for children and 8 for mothers. These instances were excluded from further analysis, leaving 253 humorous episodes for detailed examination.

Fig. 1(a) shows the count of laughs related to humorous episodes by producer/source, both for mothers and children. Notably, most laughter is elicited by the interactional partner (Partner) for both children and mothers, followed by jointly constructed humorous episodes (Collaborative). Humour arising from objects or external events (External) rarely elicits laughter (5 instances for children, 3 for mothers). Mothers' laughter is predominantly in response to humour episodes produced (intentionally or unintentionally) by their children (Fig. 1(a)). Laughler in response to humour produced by the Partner is significantly more frequent among mothers than children (Fisher's exact test, p <.001, $\varphi = 0.35^{15}$; significance threshold set at 0.016 after Bonferroni correction).

<footnote n="13">¹³ For a detailed interpretation of such value we refer to the paper in which the algorithm is presented (Lücking et al., 2011). We briefly remind that the agreement is normalized against a random baseline and that the degree of organization lies in the interval between -1 and 1, where 0 indicates that the agreement observed is solely due to chance. The observed value of 0.7 is therefore significantly higher than what is expected by chance.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ As per Krippendorff (2012, p. 241), Krippendorff's $\alpha \ge 0.8$ indicates a reliable agreement, while $\alpha \ge 0.66$ is acceptable for tentative conclusions.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ The phi coefficient ($\varphi$) is a measure of effect size used for 2 × 2 contingency tables. It reflects the strength of association between two binary variables and ranges from 0 (no association) to 1 (perfect association). Interpretation guidelines (Cohen, 2013) suggest that $\varphi$ values of approximately 0.10, 0.30, and 0.50 correspond to small, medium, and large effect sizes, respectively.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Laughs by child and mother related to humorous episodes, with colour coding indicating the producer or source of each humorous episode.</figcaption></figure>

Conversely, children laugh more in response to humour they produce themselves (Self: Fisher's exact test, p <.001, $\phi$= 0.24) or collaboratively with their partner (Collaborative: Fisher's exact test, p <.001, $\phi$= 0.17). Fig. 1(b) displays the longitudinal count of laughs related to humorous episodes by producer. We ran a logistic regression,<fnref n="16" /> using the *glm* function from the *lme4* package (Bates, Kliegl, Vasishth, & Baayen, 2015), in order to explore whether *age* affected the number of laughs produced by children and mothers, treating laughter occurrence as a dichotomous dependent variable for each second of the video analysed (laughter present/laughter not present).¹⁷¹⁸ We applied the Helmert contrast, which allows us to compare each time point to the average of the previous ones. The formula is reported in (1), coefficients are reported in Appendix in Table C.4, and a graphical illustration of the significant interactions is available in Appendix Fig. C.6.

1. ($\text{glm}(\text{Laughter} \sim \text{Age} * \text{Participant}, \text{data} = \text{data}, \text{family} = \text{binomial})$)

Mothers produce significantly more laughs related to humorous episodes than children independently of the developmental stage ($\beta$=0.43, SE=0.13, z=3.21, p = 0.001). Notably we observe interactions showing that especially for children there is an increase in laughter production when comparing the 24 months stages to the average of the previous ones (24 vs (12+18)/2) ($\beta$=-0.25, SE= 0.11, z= -2.21, p =.027) and the last time-point (36 months) to the average of the previous ones (36 vs. (12+18+24+30)/4) ($\beta$=-0.16, SE= 0.06, z=-2.76, p = 0.006). Laughter related to self-produced humorous episodes increases over time for children, especially when comparing the 24 months stage to the average of the previous ones ($\beta$=.59, SE=0.22, z=2.67, p = 0.008) and the 36 months stage to the average of the previous one ($\beta$=0.19, SE= 0.09, z=2.05, p = 0.04) (Full output is reported in Table C.5). For mothers, despite graphic observation (Fig. 1(b)) suggests a tendency towards a longitudinal increase in laughter related to self-produced humour episodes, this does not result statistically significant, possibly due to the limited sample size of these occurrences.

### 4.3. Script Opposition

The most frequent Script Opposition (SO) in humorous episodes appreciated by children and mothers is Normal/Abnormal, with a slightly higher proportion in mothers than children (Fisher's exact test, p = .011, $\phi$= 0.13; significance threshold set at 0.016 after Bonferroni correction) (Fig. 2(a)). The Possible/Impossible SO is significantly more common in children (Fisher's exact test, p < .001, $\phi$= 0.19), while Actual/Non-Actual occurs slightly more frequently in mothers (17 instances) than in children (10 instances) (Fisher's exact test, p = .016, $\phi$= 0.05). A graphical observation of Fig. 2(b) suggests longitudinal trends in SO types for children and mothers from 12 to 36 months. While Normal/Abnormal and Possible/Impossible remain relatively stable over time, Actual/Non-Actual appears in children only from 24 months onward. The SO Normal/Abnormal appears as early as 12 months in both production and perception. The SO Possible/Impossible first emerges in perception (Partner: 12 months) and later in production (Self: 18 months) in children (see Fig. E.7 in Appendix). Contrarily, although data are limited, no difference is observed between production and perception for the SO Actual/Non-Actual.

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ A mixed-effect logistic model was not a viable option given the limited amount of data available.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Only two laughs had a duration lower than 0.5 s, and they were not from the same video. There is, therefore, no possibility that two laughs occurred in the same window.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ The operationalization chosen is aimed at maximizing the informativeness of our data, given the limited sample size.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2. Script Oppositions in humorous episodes appreciated by Children and Mothers.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3. Domains involved in humour episodes appreciated and produced by Children and Mothers.</figcaption></figure>

## 4.4. Knowledge Domains

Fig. 3(a) shows the percentages of laughs across the three main Knowledge Domain categories in children and mothers. SO related to *Natural World & Objects* are significantly more common in children than mothers (Fisher's exact test, p < .001, φ= 0.19); significance threshold set at 0.016 after Bonferroni correction). Conversely, SO related to the *Meta-Linguistic* domain are more frequent in mothers (Fisher's exact test, p = .004, φ= 0.15), while SOs related to *Social Conventions* are similar between groups (Fisher's exact test, p = 0.26, φ= 0.06).

Examining longitudinal patterns in proportion (Fig. 3(b)), we observe a tendency from children to show a higher appreciation for SO related to the *Natural World & Objects* compared to mothers especially during the 3rd year of life (p= .02, φ=0.13) compared to the 2nd (p= .09, φ=0.11) or 4th (p=.29; φ=0.07).<sup>19</sup> Mothers, however, show a stronger response to *Social Convention* violations at early time points, with more balanced rates between mothers and children by 36 months. Humour episodes in the *Meta-Linguistic* domain remain consistently more frequent in mothers across all time points.

Meta-linguistic humour episodes emerge earlier in perception (12 months) than in production (18 months) in children, with strong appreciation/reinforcement from mothers from the earliest time point (see Fig. E.8 in Appendix). Child laughter related to self-produced humorous episodes is often tied to Social Convention violations, whereas such instances are nearly absent in mothers (Fisher's exact test, p < .001, φ = 0.45).

## 4.5. Script Oppositions across Knowledge Domains

Fig. 4 shows the distribution of Script Opposition (SO) types across different sub-domains (see Section 3.5.3 for definitions). SOs are unevenly distributed across domains: Normal/Abnormal appears across all domains, whereas Possible/Impossible and Actual/Non-Actual in children occur only in the *Natural World & Objects* and *Semantics* domains. Certain sub-domains emerge later in child development. For example, laughs related to *Conversational Rules* violations appear from 18 months and those related to *Moral Rule* violations from 24 months (Fig. 4(b)).

Comparing mothers and children over time, we find that within the Social Conventions domain, mothers exhibit significantly fewer laughs related to Moral Rule violations than children (Fisher's Exact test: p=.006, φ=0.13) (Fig. 4(b)). In the Meta-Linguistic

<footnote n="19"><sup>19</sup> The statistical results from the longitudinal analysis should be taken cautiously due to the small sample size and the small effect sizes observed.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4. Distribution of Script Opposition according to the sub-domains over time.</figcaption></figure>

domain (Fig. 4(c)) children's laughter primarily relates to humorous episodes involving *Phonetic* aspects, with significantly fewer laughs related to *Phonology*, *Semantics*, and none involving *Less Probable meanings* (Pragmatics) (see Section 3.5.3). On the other hand, mothers show a decrease in laughs related to Phonology, with only a few laughs related to Less Probable meanings when the child reaches 36 months.

## 4.6. Multi-dimensionality of humour episodes

Each humorous episode can contain multiple SOs, either of the same type or different types (e.g., two instances of Abnormal/Normal and one of Impossible/Possible, see Example 1). Our dataset comprises 253 humorous episodes, with 396 SOs identified and annotated. Fig. 5(a) shows the percentage of laughter related to humorous episodes involving different numbers of SOs for children and mothers. Most humorous episodes for both children and mothers contain only one SO. However, the proportion of single-SO episodes is significantly higher in mothers than in children (Fisher's exact test, p = .002, φ = 0.19), while children are significantly more likely to have episodes involving three SOs (Fisher's exact test, p < .001, φ = 0.25). An example of a three-SO humorous episode is shown in Extract 1, where a child laughs at the mother mimicking a hen sound. We identified three SOs: (1) an Abnormal/Normal opposition in the Natural World & Objects (N&O) domain, concerning the Human Scheme (a human typically doesn't make hen sounds); (2) an Impossible/Possible opposition, also in the NW domain, related to Physical Laws (it's impossible for a human to become a hen, linked to Pretence); (3) an Abnormal/Normal opposition in the Meta-Linguistic (ML) domain, specifically phonetics (the sound had atypical rhythm, pitch, and variation compared to usual maternal vocalizations).

### (1) Example from the Providence Corpus - Naima 010014

M: and there's a hen. a hen says ... bocko

C: ⟨laughter/⟩

M: bocko, bocko (x16)

C: ⟨laughter/⟩

M: that's what a hen says. and here's a duck.

When examined over time (Fig. 5(b)), these differences are most prominent between 12 and 30 months: for the window 12–18 months (2nd year) and 24–30 months (3rd year) we observe a significant difference between mother and child laughter related to humourous episodes involving 3 SO (Fisher's exact test: 2nd year p=.01, φ=0.3; 3rd year p=.005, φ=0.25). By 36 months (4th year), children's patterns resemble those of mothers (Fisher's exact test:p = 1), and no humorous episodes involving three SOs are observed in children at this age. Regarding the source of humour (Fig. 5(c)), most three-SO humour episodes in children are produced by the *Partner* or *Collaboratively*, with significantly fewer produced by the children themselves (*Self*) (Fisher's exact test: p=.001, φ=0.39). Symmetrically, for mothers, the majority of laughs related to three-SO humorous episodes are associated with self-produced (*Self*) humorous episodes (Fisher's exact test: p=.006, φ 0.35).
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5. Number of SO per humorous episodes in Children and Mothers.</figcaption></figure>

# 5. Discussion

We conducted a longitudinal analysis of humour episodes marked or appreciated by laughter production in mother-child interactions from 12 to 36 months of age. This study provides a detailed characterization by combining (1) *Script Opposition* (SO) analysis based on the *General Theory of Verbal Humor* (Attardo & Raskin, 1991) and (2) a new classification of SO *Knowledge Domains*, developed to integrate prior research on child humour development and to gain insights into the relationship between humour and socio-cognitive growth.

Our analysis uniquely accounts for multiple sources of incongruity within a single humorous episode, unlike previous classifications in child humour research, constituted by mutually exclusive categories. This approach aligns more closely with methodologies in adult humour research (e.g., Archakis and Tsakona 2005, Attardo 1994, 2001).

Results reveal significant differences between mothers and children across all analysed dimensions, suggesting developmental trends that reflect underlying cognitive growth. By 36 months, children's humour production and appreciation more closely resemble those of mothers.

## 5.1. Laughter and humorous episodes

Our analysis reveals that most laughter in mother-child interactions is linked to humorous episodes (Pleasant incongruities), aligning with findings from adult studies across various languages, cultures, and contexts (e.g., Mazzocconi et al. 2018, 2020, Rychlowska et al. 2022, Szameitat et al. 2022, Wood, Sievert, and Martin 2022). In fact, laughter related to Pleasant Incongruities occurs in proportion even more frequently than in adult interactions, suggesting a narrower range of pragmatic functions in early development (Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2023).

While this comparison should be interpreted cautiously due to differing recording contexts, we observe fewer laughter instances in mother-child interactions (Mazzocconi & Ginzburg, 2022) compared to adult conversations (Mazzocconi et al., 2020; Rathcke & Fuchs, 2022; Vettin & Todt, 2004). Notably, despite the fluctuation in occurrences mostly due to the activity dyads decided to engage with during different home recording sessions, there is a gradual increase in laughter production from the child, with early time points (12–18 months) showing significantly less laughter than mothers, which balances within the dyad by 36 months. These observations suggest that laughter's role evolves with child development, both in frequency and function.

## 5.2. Producer/source of humorous episodes (Appreciation/production)

This variable allows us to assess whether laughter is produced to show appreciation of humour produced by the partner or whether it is related to self-produced humorous episodes. This distinction provides insight into the child's attentional focus, interactional dynamics, and, when combined with further humour characterization, can indicate whether certain humour types
emerge in perception before production. Though both humour appreciation and production require a social context, they engage different cognitive processes: humour appreciation relies on identifying incongruity, interpreting the partner's humorous intent, and recognizing a playful environment. Humour production, however, also involves a motivation to elicit laughter and manipulate others' mental states, linking it even more closely to socio-cognitive, behavioural, and pragmatic development (Telli, 2023).

We observed distinct patterns in laughter occurrences, with children showing more laughter related to self-produced humour, while mothers laugh significantly more often at humour initiated by their child (partner). Over time, the proportion of laughter related to self-produced humour episodes (self) increases in both children and mothers, with their laughter patterns becoming more similar by 36 months. The increase in laughter related to children's own verbal or non-verbal actions (self) suggests a developmental trend towards creating active, self-initiated humour, and potentially reflects an expanding use of laughter as a communicative signal. Children may increasingly use laughter to capture their interlocutor's attention, disambiguate actions, and convey their intentions. For mothers, the rise in self-directed laughter indicates a more balanced interaction over time, where laughter is not only a response to the child's actions but also serves to modulate and enrich their own communicative contributions. Interestingly, mothers in interaction with children show a much lower percentage of self-related laughter than typically seen in adult conversations, where roughly half of all laughter is related to the speaker's own speech or actions (e.g., 46-57% in the cross-linguistic study by Mazzocconi et al., 2020, and 44-55% in Vettin & Todt, 2004). This suggests that mothers predominantly use laughter as a responsive or commentary signal to engage with the child's behaviour, rather than as a means to shape the meaning and signal intent of their own discourse. The high percentage of mothers' laughter directed at child-produced laughables (partner) aligns with common interaction dynamics observed in Western middle-class mothers, who tend to follow their child's attentional focus closely, a practice shown to support language learning (Abdelaziz, Wagner, & Naigles, 2024; Hoff, 2006). For mothers, the infant is often the primary focus, and the child's behaviours frequently elicit laughter (Hogan, 2007; Nwokah & Fogel, 1993). Some theories suggest that humour often stems from recognizing childlike behaviours, which may serve an evolutionary function by making caregivers more inclined to attend to their children's actions (e.g., Hogan 2007). This is in stark contrast to the child's perspective, where the mother is not necessarily the primary focus of attention. The asymmetry between mothers' laughter in response to child-initiated humour (partner) and children's laughter in response to their own humour (self) suggests that mothers often laugh at their child's verbal or non-verbal actions without the child necessarily joining in. Qualitative observation of videoclips reveals that, especially in early stages, children are often unaware of what the mother's laughter refers to. For instance, in Extracts 2 and 3, mothers find humour in actions that children did not intend as humourous. In Extract 2, the mother laughs at the child's unintentional pun, where bee is mispronounced as zee, merging the name with its sound. Similarly, in Extract 3, the mother laughs at the child's mislabelling of nose as eye.

(2) *Example from the Providence Corpus - William 010412*<fnref n="20" /> - Laughter following laughable produced by the laugher's partner
Mother (M): who's hiding in the honeycomb ?

M: huh, what's that ?

Child (C): *a zee*.

M:⟨laughter⟩bee!⟨/laughter⟩, that's right! zzzzz a bee. ⟨laughter⟩ \ ⟨laughter⟩ (a)n(d) who is hiding among the flowers ?
⟨laughter⟩

(3) *Example from the Providence Corpus - William 010412* - Laughter following laughable produced by the laugher's partner
M: what's that ?

C: yyy.

M: nose. Where's your nose ?

C: eye !

M: ⟨laughter⟩/⟩ ⟨laughter⟩ that's your nose, this is your eye. ⟨/laughter⟩ ⟨laughter⟩/⟩ You're funny.

In both cases, the child created an incongruity without awareness, did not recognize the source of the mother's laughter, and did not join in laughing. Over time, this asymmetry decreases, suggesting that shared humour appraisals may become more frequent as children develop. This supports findings by Mazzocconi and Ginzburg (2023), where shared attention on laughables (across all types, not just humorous episodes) increases from 12 to 36 months.

Finally, it is noteworthy that a high percentage of humorous episodes are co-constructed (collaborative), while few are related to external entities (external). This supports previous findings (e.g., Coates 2007, Provine 2001) that humour primarily arises within the interaction and relationship between participants rather than from external elements alone, even from early stages of development. The minimal occurrence of laughter linked to external humorous stimuli underscores the inherently interactive nature of humour (Haugh & Priego-Valverde, 2024; Maraev, Mazzocconi, Howes, & Ginzburg, 2018). Although humour can sometimes involve external, inanimate entities or situations, this is considerably rarer than other forms of humour appreciation, even in adult interactions (Mazzocconi et al., 2020; Méaume, 2023).

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Each extract is provided with the age of the child following the conventions used in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000), namely specifying year, month and day of age: yymmdd.</footnote>
### 5.3. Script Opposition

We observed that the *ab/normal* SO is the most frequent for both children and mothers across all time points, starting as early as 12 months. This aligns with the innate capacity to detect deviations from expected patterns, a fundamental aspect of our brain's predictive functioning (e.g., MMN Kuhl & Rivera-Gaxiola, 2008, N400 Lau, Phillips, & Poeppel, 2008, Predictive Brain Bubic, Von Cramon, & Schubotz, 2010; Friston, 2005). This ability to detect deviations may underlie the evolutionary benefit of humour (Polimeni & Reiss, 2006a), as the recognition of incongruity paired with reward is linked to stimulation of the limbic and dopaminergic reward networks (Dunbar et al., 2012; Manninen et al., 2017; Talami, Vaudano, & Meletti, 2020).

Interestingly, children's laughter is significantly more often associated with *im/possible* SOs than mothers'. Humour is often most engaging at the *zone of proximal development* (Piaget, 1945; Vygotsky, 1980) (see Section 1.1), making this SO particularly appealing to children as they build their understanding of the world's ontology. For mothers, these incongruities may elicit less amusement, as they are easily resolved at their “developmental” stage. This corroborates existing literature (e.g., Martin 2007, Mireault and Reddy 2016, Reddy et al. 2002) suggesting that the types of humour children enjoy provide insight into their current model of the world, as well as the progressive expansion and refinement of their ontology of the world.

The *non/actual* SO emerges only from 24 months, likely because appreciating this type of humour requires co-activating and switching between two plausible scripts within a given context. This process demands more complex cognitive abilities—such as working memory, executive function, and inhibition—that continue to develop through childhood (Best & Miller, 2010).

These findings contrast with the SO distribution in adult joke structures: in a *joke corpus*, Hempelmann and Ruch (2005) found *non/actual* to be the most frequent SO, followed by *ab/normal* and *im/possible*. Future research should examine whether this discrepancy reflects the child's developmental stage or is a typical pattern of naturalistic *conversational* humour, as compared to scripted jokes, also in adulthood.

### 5.4. Knowledge Domains

Over time, the SOs that children find humorous differ from those appreciated by mothers, particularly in relation to Knowledge Domains. Children show a significantly higher proportion of humour appreciation related to the *Natural World & Objects* domain compared to mothers (see Fig. 3(a) and Section 3.5 for domains definitions). This aligns with the earlier discussion on the higher occurrence of *im/possible* SOs in children, who are actively learning about the physical world, human behaviours, and object properties. Since these SOs often involve concepts at the child's *zone of proximal development* (Vygotsky, 1980), they are especially engaging for children.

For example, in Extract 4, the child finds humour in violating conventional *Object Use* and *Human Schemas* within the Natural World & Objects domain: while playing with a puppet, the child first laughs at the incongruous placement of shoes on the puppet's head instead of its feet, then laughs again when the puppet is positioned upside-down, standing on its head rather than on its feet.

#### (4) Example from the Providence Corpus - Alex 020606 - Use of Object and Human Scheme (Natural World & Objects)

M: what, shoes on his head? no, that's silly!

C: (laughter/).

M: then he can do a flip. y ooo boop ! (making sound of potato head flipping.)

C: on hhis (.i) head.

M: he stands on his head.

C: on yyy his hat.

M: tuuuu.

C: (laughter/)

M: he's so silly.

Similarly, Extract 5 provides another instance of child-directed humour in the Natural World & Objects domain. Here, the child laughs at the perceived violation of “Physical laws”, finding it funny that despite watering a plant, it fails to grow. The opposing scripts at stake seem to be (1) “If one waters plants, they grow and change” and (2) “One waters plants, and they do not grow and don’t change”.

#### (5) Example from the Providence Corpus - Naima 030101 - Physical laws (Natural World & Objects)

(Growing plants)

C: it doesn't look different. It looks the same. It's not working!

M: nah: !

C: (laughter/)

These insights may help explain the well-documented observation that children exhibit a greater enjoyment of what is often termed *absurd humour* compared to adults (Mireault et al., 2015).

Laughter related to *Social Convention* violations is more frequent in mothers than children from 12 to 30 months, reaching similar levels by 36 months (Fig. 3), suggesting a developing appreciation for this type of incongruity in children. Within specific sub-domains, in our dataset, children begin to appreciate violations of *Social Routines* as humorous episodes as early as 12 months, *Conversational Rules* at 18 months, and *Moral Rules* from 24 months. This aligns with literature suggesting that 24 months is a
developmental milestone when children begin to be seen as “moral agents” by adults and are expected to follow moral norms (Essler & Paulus, 2021; Paulus, 2020). Although teasing behaviours are observed as early as infancy (Reddy, 2001; Reddy, Williams, & Costall, 2022), and violation of moral rules are observed since 10 months of life (Baillargeon, Setoh, Sloane, Jin, & Bian, 2014; Bloom, 2014; Vaish & Tomasello, 2013), the appreciation and production of violations of Moral Rules as humorous episodes in our data are observed from 24 months. This may be related to the fact that before then, children are not expected to behave “morally”. Violating moral rules when one is not expected to respect them would not indeed lead to the instantiation of an incongruity. By this age, children begin to intentionally test others’ expectations and reactions to moral transgressions, indicating an awareness of expected behaviour and they can therefore be considered responsible for the “non-moral actions” (Essler & Paulus, 2021; Paulus, 2020). Analysing laughter related to Moral Rule violations thus provides insight into evolving social expectations and the developing psychological processes that allow children to navigate and challenge these norms (Eckert, Winkler, & Cartmill, 2020; Reddy et al., 2022).

In Extract (6), we observe a humorous episode featuring an *ab/normal* SO within the Social Conventions—Conversational Conventions sub-domain, combined with an SO in the Meta-linguistic—Phonological domain. Here, the child laughs after a prolonged, alternating repetition of the same word by both interlocutors. This behaviour is atypical according to conversational norms, which generally prioritize relevance and the introduction of new information rather than repeated utterances. This could be viewed as a violation of Grice's maxim of manner (Grice, 1975) or, in post-Gricean terms, as a breach of the relevance principle (Sperber, 1995), a common strategy for creating incongruity and eliciting humour in both children and adults (Attardo, 1993; Yus, 2016). It is nevertheless important to acknowledge that in infant–mother interactions, behavioural repetition is both common and expected. Reciprocal repetitions are often even desirable, as they play a central role in early learning (Essler, Becher, Pletti, Gniewosz, & Paulus, 2023) (for example through imitation (Tomasello & Carpenter, 2005)), language development (e.g. Xavier and Walker 2018), but also conversational dynamics development and bonding (e.g. Gratier and Apter-Danon 2009). However, even in mother–infant interaction there can be a degree in the amount of repetition considered typical before they come to be appraised as unusual and incongruous, and prolonged repetitions can indeed even be exploited by caregivers to instantiate (verbal or non-verbal) playful interactions.

(6) Example from the Providence Corpus - Naima 010604 - Conversational Rules (SC) and Phonological (ML)

(Mum and child playing labelling geometric figures)

M: hm: that's a square . M: square .

C: scuare .

M: square !

C: ⟨laughter/⟩ scuare .

M: square !

Laughter related to *Moral Rules* violations is more frequent in children than in mothers (Fig. 4(b)), highlighting an asymmetry where mothers often do not join in the child's laughter on these occasions. Humorous episodes involving Moral Rule violations are frequently associated with teasing by the child (Reddy, 1991), and mothers may be less inclined to reinforce these behaviours with laughter, either as part of the play or for pedagogical reasons. This pattern aligns with the fact that most instances of child laughter in self-produced humorous episodes involve Social Convention violations (see Fig. E.8 in Appendix). The child's intentional teasing by breaking Moral Rules is especially relevant to socio-cognitive development, as it requires not only understanding the norm but also playing with others' expectations (Airenti, 2016; Colle et al., 2023; Reddy, 1991, 2008). Recognizing that breaking a norm can provoke specific reactions—and knowing how to present the violation in a playful way to elicit amusement instead of anger—demonstrates a growing capacity to read, anticipate, and influence others' mental states (Reddy, 1991). Our analysis thus captures the gradual emergence of this sophisticated social play, showing how children increasingly enjoy testing and engaging with others' expectations and mental states.

In the *Meta-linguistic* domain, children and mothers similarly appreciate SOs related to *Phonetic* aspects of speech and vocal production from as early as 12 months (e.g., Extract 1). However, SOs related to *Phonology* and *Semantics* are less common in children. The early presence of *Phonetic* SOs, especially in mother-initiated humour, aligns with research indicating that adults use marked or exaggerated phonetic features to signal humorous intentions to children (Hoicka & Butcher, 2016). An example of a child-produced humorous episode in the *Semantic* sub-domain is shown in Extract 7. Here, the child humorously responds to the mother's question about where she completed an activity by saying *upstairs* instead of *downstairs*. This creates an *im/possible* SO, as completing the activity *upstairs* was impossible, a fact highlighted by the mother's rebuttal.

(7) Example from the Providence Corpus - Naima 010604

M: where did you make the coffee this morning?

C: <smiling> upstairs.

M: upstairs !? that's a joke, right ?

C: ⟨laughter/⟩

M: ⟨laughter⟩yeah(/laughter), you're making a joke ! you know that coffee ... there's no kitchen upstairs !

Humorous episodes in the *Pragmatic* sub-domain, involving a mismatch between what is said and what is intended (see Section 3.5.3), are observed exclusively in mothers when the child reaches 36 months and are absent in children. This suggests that SOs within this domain may still be too complex for children, who, although developing phonological and semantic skills, are not yet
ready to “play” with these more nuanced aspects of language. The ability to appreciate less probable meanings (e.g., irony or scare-
quoting) has been shown to emerge later in childhood (Angeleri & Airenti, 2014; Recchia et al., 2010). The lack of shared laughter
on this type of humour underscores the cognitive demands required to appreciate such incongruities. Additionally, it also highlights
that, while joining someone’s laughter without full comprehension of the laughable is possible (Bell, 2015), children’s shared laughter
with parents is not solely due to imitation or automatic mimicry but also involves some level of shared understanding. Children
need at least to recognize—and eventually appreciate—the laughable behind their caregiver’s laughter, pointing to a developing
capacity for joint comprehension.

Despite the taxonomies employed are not overlapping, it is informative to compare our findings with those reported in previous
studies. Our longitudinal data, which follow the same group of children from 12 to 36 months, confirm Hoicka and Akhtar (2012)'s
observations based on 10 min interactions with different groups of children at 24 and 36 months—namely, that object-based humour
is consistently observable from 24 months onward, and align with data from their parental survey and the one reported in Hoicka
et al. (2022), showing that it can be present even at earlier stages (in our data at 12 months) as observed also in Johnson and Mervis
(1997) in a longitudinal diary based study of one child. These results therefore partly confirm the McGhee model predicting Object
based humour at 1–2 years of age. Another noteworthy point of alignment between our findings and those of Hoicka and Akhtar
(2012), Hoicka et al. (2022) emerges when their category of Taboo Topics and Aggressive Humour is considered a subclass of our
Moral Rules subdomain—specifically, if discussing taboo topics and be aggressive are interpreted as a violation of culturally defined
moral norms. In line with their parental survey data, we also observe a marked increase in laughter associated with humorous
episodes involving moral rule violations at 24 months. On the other hand, while in Hoicka et al. (2022) violation of Social Rules are
observed in 50% of the children only from 44 months, in our data we observe them already from 24 months, in line with Dubois
et al. (1984). Finally, consistent with findings from Hoicka and Akhtar (2012), Hoicka et al. (2022), we also observed instances
of label-based humour—corresponding to the Semantics subclass in our classification—to be more prominent during the third year
of life (30–36 months), although still relatively rare in our corpus. While Johnson and Mervis (1997) documented incongruous
labelling as early as 18 months in a single-child longitudinal study, our data, along with that of Hoicka and Akhtar (2012), Dubois
et al. (1984), and the large-scale survey by Hoicka et al. (2022), suggest that such forms of humour typically become more frequent
after 24 months. Furthermore, the emergence of invented words appears to occur even later, as also noted by Hoicka et al. (2022),
indicating that label-based humour may be appreciated by children at a later stage than originally proposed in McGhee's model. Our
data also aligns with the parental survey report from Hoicka et al. (2022) which shows that Human Scheme incongruities (Funny
faces, bodily humour, and funny voices) are well present already from the first year of life.

5.5. *Script Oppositions across different Knowledge Domains*

Fig. 4 illustrates that the type of SO alone does not fully account for the progressive development of humour appreciation. For instance, the appreciation of some humorous episodes pertaining to specific sub-domains (e.g. Moral Rules) is observed later in development despite the SO involved (ab/normal) appears as early as the first year of life. The interaction between Knowledge Domains and SOs provides deeper insights into the types of humour children appreciate and the cognitive processes involved. Notably, certain Domains naturally align with specific SO types. For example, SOs involving Physical Laws violations are significantly more common in children than in mothers and are primarily of the *im/possible* type. This aligns with the idea that, during early development, children are actively learning about the physical principles governing the world; violations of these principles fall within their zone of proximal development and are therefore perceived as amusing (see Section 5.3).

Conversely, SOs related to Social Convention violations exclusively involve the *ab/normal* type. Similarly, also humorous episodes pertaining to the Human Scheme or Phonetics involve only ab/normal SOs, since at least in real human interaction (in contrast to fiction) one can have only alteration of possible patterns (abnormal scripts).

5.6. *Multi-dimensionality*

Our data indicate that children laugh significantly more frequently than their caregivers in relation to humorous episodes involving multiple SOs (not necessarily of different types; see example in Section 4.6), particularly between 12 and 30 months. By 36 months, the amount of SOs in humorous episodes becomes more similar between children and caregivers. This may suggest that younger children have a particular appreciation for exaggerated incongruities, aligning with discussions on hyperbole in Varga (2000). On the other hand, this finding specifically calls into question Stage 3 of McGhee's model (1977, 1979), which posits that only at this stage (3-4 years old) are children capable of appreciating multiple incongruities related to several aspects of a given concept.

Notably, this higher frequency of child laughter in relation to humorous episodes involving multiple SOs applies only for those
instantiated by the *partner* (see Fig. 5(c)); no such asymmetry is observed for child-produced humour. A possible explanation is that
early in development, children may find it easier to detect and appreciate humour cues by multiple incongruous elements, consistent
with predictions from the Parallel Constraints Model of pragmatic language (and action) processing (Katz, 2004; Pexman, 2008).
This suggests that understanding meaning involves the simultaneous evaluation of multiple contextual cues allowing listeners to
interpret language and actions efficiently and flexibly within complex social interactions, and that the presence of multiple cues
would facilitate interpretation and processing. Such interpretation would be in line with results in other domains of developmental
psychology where it has been observed that the co-occurrence of multiple cues (especially when intersensory (Bahrick, Lickliter,
& Flom, 2004)) facilitates the detection or processing of particular phenomena such as, among others, identification of social
groups (Powell & Spelke, 2013), self-regulation and imitation (Repacholi, Meltzoff, Rowe, & Toub, 2014), agency (Johnson, 2010), physical reasoning (Baillargeon, Scott, & Bian, 2016), object identification (Cantrell, Kanjlia, Harrison, Luck, & Oakes, 2019), identification and learning of abstract rules (Frank, Slemmer, Marcus, & Johnson, 2009).

Qualitative observations suggest that episodes containing three SOs often involve elements of pretence play, adding an extra layer of incongruity (see annotations to be shared with the final version of the current manuscript). Here, *pretence play* refers specifically to imaginative or symbolic play, where children create make-believe scenarios and act out roles or situations removed from immediate reality (Lillard, 2007). In such play, children might pretend to be characters like superheroes or animals or repurpose objects symbolically (e.g., using a broken bag as a bracelet). These episodes bear resemblance to a subtype of adult humour termed *joint fantasizing* (Priego-Valverde, 2006; Stallone & Haugh, 2017), where humour arises from collaboratively constructed imaginary contexts.

## 6. Limitations and further studies

We acknowledge the limited sample size (4 mother-child dyads over 5 time points), constrained by the labour-intensive manual annotation process. Future research will aim to include a larger and more diverse cohort, enabling comparisons across cultural and linguistic groups. Our study currently focuses exclusively on middle-class, American English-speaking dyads, limiting the generalizability of our findings to other languages and cultures, which are known to influence both interactional dynamics in parenting (Hoff, 2006) and humour perception and production (Davies, 1990; Jiang, Li, & Hou, 2019; Martin, 2007; Yue, Jiang, Lu, & Hiranandani, 2016). Expanding our study to a broader sample is essential to test the generalizability of our results, and especially needed to confirm some longitudinal analyses and the replicability of some of the patterns observed with small effect sizes. The scalability of such studies could improve with advances in automatic tools for humour detection and analysis, which could be improved by interdisciplinary collaboration between computer scientists, linguists, and cognitive scientists (e.g. Maraev et al., 2018). Our publicly available dataset, with detailed manual annotations, may serve as a valuable resource for such developments.

Future work will also consider analysing the Logical Mechanisms (Attardo & Raskin, 1991) children use to partially resolve incongruities (when applicable) in humorous events, providing deeper insights into their humour and its cognitive underpinnings development. Moreover, examining the cues children and mothers use to signal intentional humour—and how these cues affect the partner's response—would build on existing research (Hoicka, 2016; Hoicka & Butcher, 2016). To fully validate our interpretations, future studies should follow individual children longitudinally incorporating regular longitudinal assessments of cognitive, language, and mentalizing skills alongside interaction recordings to explore correlations between humour appreciation and neuropsychological development, as has been done in cross-sectional studies examining different children at different developmental stages (Telli & Hoicka, 2022). Our combined manual, interaction-informed annotations followed by quantitative analysis and qualitative observations have offered valuable insights into child cognitive development and caregiver-child dynamics. Extending this framework to interactions in middle childhood and adulthood could further clarify how laughter and humour appreciation evolve across the lifespans.

## 7. Conclusion

Our results indicate that observing laughter in relation to humorous episodes offers valuable insights into early cognitive, linguistic, and pragmatic development. Our approach relies on the premise that recognizing and enjoying incongruity as humorous requires an understanding of the violated pattern, thereby revealing children's knowledge and cultural learning. This study is, to our knowledge, the first longitudinal investigation of early childhood humour using concepts from the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo, 2001), particularly Script Oppositions (SOs). By combining SO analysis with a detailed classification of humour domains, we gained deeper insights into the knowledge and cognitive abilities children acquire over time. Our findings highlight that even just looking at who is producing laughter and who is producing the humorous episode yields valuable insights into mother-child dynamics.

Moreover, examining the types of SOs appraised as humorous provides clues about children's cognitive development, while Domain-specific analysis sheds light on their attentional focus and acquired knowledge. We observe a progressive emergence of SO types, reflecting increasing cognitive complexity: *normal/abnormal, possible/impossible, and actual/non-actual*. Notably, certain domains show significant asymmetries between children and mothers, with some humour types emerging first in perception before appearing in children's own production.

In particular, we showed that observing early humour appreciation and production in interaction can give us insight into child acquisition of general principles of reasoning (see for example the Extract 5) otherwise hard to investigate or enquiry about, especially at early stages of development. Studying the perception and production of humour in children can therefore enrich and interact with previous work aimed at investigating the acquisition (and evolution) of *topoi* (i.e. principles of reasoning recognized within a socio-cultural community in relation to a specific context) in childhood (Breitholtz & Howes, 2020).

Especially when considered together with previous cross-sectional studies based on short interactions or parental surveys of different groups of children at different developmental stages (especially Hoicka & Akhtar, 2012; Hoicka et al., 2022), the data collected contribute to refining humour developmental models, such as McGhee's stages (McGhee, 1979), showing that certain humour types emerge earlier in interactive contexts than previously thought. We observe misnaming humour as early as 18 months (compared to McGhee's 2–4 years), playing with word sounds at 12 months (compared to McGhee's 3–5 years). Additionally, we find instances of adult-like humour, such as joint fantasizing, already present in early childhood.
Particularly interesting from a cognitive developmental perspective, our data show that young children, particularly between 12 and 30 months, respond more frequently to humorous episodes produced by the mother that contain multiple SOs. Children's own humour production, in contrast, typically involves a single SO. This may therefore suggest not a general preference for humorous episodes containing multiple sources of incongruity, but rather the need for multiple cues of the mother's humorous intentions. This finding specifically calls into question Stage 3 of McGhee's model (1977, 1979), which posits that only at this stage (3-4 years old) are children capable of appreciating multiple incongruities related to several aspects of a given concept.

Finally, the observed differences in humour and laughter between mother–child interactions, adult–adult conversations, and the developmental trajectory within mother–child dyads, underscore the dynamic impact each individual has on the interactional system (Fusaroli, Rączaszek-Leonardi, & Tylén, 2014). These findings support further investigation into laughter in early interactions. Laughter is a powerful rewarding and reinforcing behaviour, both in production and perception, both for children and adults (Manninen et al., 2017; Talami et al., 2020). Adult laughter can shape a child's cognitive and behavioural development, while child laughter serves as an important means for eliciting adult behaviours that support their developmental needs. This aligns with research demonstrating children's active role in their own learning by eliciting the adult behaviour that best fits their neuropsychological development and which would best facilitate growth (Gros-Louis, West, & King, 2016; Lucca & Wilbourn, 2018; Smith, Jayaraman, Clerkin, & Yu, 2018; Smith & Trainor, 2008).

### CRediT authorship contribution statement

**Chiara Mazzocconi:** Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. **Béatrice Priego-Valverde:** Writing – review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Methodology, Conceptualization.

### Funding statement

This work, carried out within the Labex BLRI (ANR-11-LABX-0036) and the Institut Convergence ILCB (ANR-16-CONV-0002), has benefited from support from the French government, managed by the French National Agency for Research (ANR) and the Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University (A*MIDEX).

### Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

### Acknowledgements

We owe heartfelt thanks to all kids and caregivers who participated in the corpus data collection.
## Appendix A. Video analysis details

The MLU (in morphemes) values reported are calculated over the full length of the videos partially annotated for laughter. These were computed using the MLU program in CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000). We excluded from the MLU calculation words that were unintelligible using the formula MLU +t*CHI -t%mor -syy -sxx @ for children and MLU +t*MOT -t%mor -syy -sxx @ for the mothers. We see that the children all have typical language development, with Naima standing out for her faster language development.

Full videos and transcripts are available upon creation of a TalkBank account (free).

<table><caption>**Table A.2**
Information about videos analysed – Age, MLU, links and transcripts.</caption><thead><tr><th>Child</th><th>Time</th><th>Age</th><th>MLU</th><th>Video</th><th>Transcript</th><th>Minutes</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td rowspan="5">Alex</td><td>1</td><td>01:04.27</td><td>1(0)</td><td>010427</td><td>010427</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>01:06.14</td><td>1.1(0.3)</td><td>010614</td><td>010614</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>02:01.02</td><td>1.82(1.11)</td><td>020102</td><td>020102</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>02:06.06</td><td>2.32(1.51)</td><td>020606</td><td>020606</td><td>26.5</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>03:01.03</td><td>2.6(1.86)</td><td>030103</td><td>030103</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="6">Lily</td><td>1</td><td>01:01.02</td><td>1.51(0.5)</td><td>010102</td><td>010102</td><td>31</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>01:06.11</td><td>1.33(0.54)</td><td>010611</td><td>010611</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>02:00.04</td><td>2.28(2.06)</td><td>020004</td><td>020004</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>02:06.04</td><td>3.15(2.31)</td><td>020604</td><td>020604</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>03:00.03</td><td></td><td>030003</td><td>030003</td><td>20.12</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>03:00.10</td><td></td><td>030010</td><td>030010</td><td>6.15</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="6">Naima</td><td>5</td><td>sum</td><td>3.28(2.5)</td><td>-</td><td>-</td><td>26.27</td></tr><tr><td>1</td><td>01:00.14</td><td>1.09(0.28)</td><td>010014</td><td>010014</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>01:06.04</td><td>2.82(2)</td><td>010604</td><td>010604</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>02:00.04</td><td>3.63(2.66)</td><td>020004</td><td>020004</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>02:06.11</td><td>3.11(2.9)</td><td>020611</td><td>020611</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>02:11.23</td><td></td><td>021123</td><td>021123</td><td>15.66</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="6">William</td><td>5</td><td>03:01.01</td><td></td><td>030101</td><td>030101</td><td>15</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>sum</td><td>4.41(3.48)</td><td>-</td><td>-</td><td>30.66</td></tr><tr><td>1</td><td>01:04.12</td><td>1.22(0.43)</td><td>010412</td><td>010412</td><td>26.08</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>01:06.05</td><td>1.27(0.66)</td><td>010605</td><td>010605</td><td>28</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>02:00.12</td><td>1.51(0.82)</td><td>020012</td><td>020012</td><td>30.04</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>02:06.12</td><td>2.39(1.73)</td><td>020612</td><td>020612</td><td>30.18</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>5</td><td>03:00.11</td><td>3.52(2.47)</td><td>030011</td><td>030011</td><td>27.73</td></tr></tbody></table>

## Appendix B. Inter-coder annotation agreement

### B.1. Inter-coder annotation agreement on SO by subdomain

See Table B.3.

<table><caption>**Table B.3**
Inter-coder annotation agreement on SO by subdomain.</caption><thead><tr><th>Feature</th><th>% Agreement (2 coders)</th><th>Krippendorff's α</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Natural World &amp; Objects - Human Scheme - SO</td><td>90.81</td><td>0.82</td></tr><tr><td>Natural World &amp; Objects - Physical Laws - SO</td><td>90.11</td><td>0.79</td></tr><tr><td>Natural World &amp; Objects - Objects use/properties - SO</td><td>92.93</td><td>0.79</td></tr><tr><td>Social Convention - Social Routines - SO</td><td>87.28</td><td>0.69</td></tr><tr><td>Social Convention - Moral Rules - SO</td><td>92.58</td><td>0.72</td></tr><tr><td>Social Convention - Conversational Rules - SO</td><td>91.87</td><td>0.76</td></tr><tr><td>Meta-Linguistic - Phonetics/sounds - SO</td><td>92.23</td><td>0.83</td></tr><tr><td>Meta-Linguistic - Phonology - SO</td><td>94.35</td><td>0.82</td></tr><tr><td>Meta-Linguistic - Semantics - SO</td><td>93.29</td><td>0.81</td></tr><tr><td>Meta-Linguistic - Pragmatics - SO</td><td>94.35</td><td>0.67</td></tr><tr><td>Overall</td><td>91.98</td><td>0.77</td></tr></tbody></table>
## B.2. Example of disagreements on social convention domain

We report some examples of disagreements on the annotation of humorous episodes related to the social convention domain which resulted in a, despite acceptable, lower degree of interannotator agreement compared to the other domains (84,45% and Krippendorff's α of 0.64) (see Table 1). We believe the primary reason lies in the non-mutually exclusive nature of the annotation scheme: violations of social conventions often co-occur with behaviours that can be attributed to other domains (e.g., sensory-motor, use/properties of objects or metalinguistic), and were not always annotated consistently by both coders. For example, in one case, a child made grimaces, which one annotator classified exclusively under Human Scheme (due to its physical/sensory nature and alteration of the facial human scheme), while the other also marked it as a Social Convention violation, since children are generally told not to make them. In another case, a child took off her socks while declaring to the mum "I am taking my socks off!" using a funny voice and prosody; one annotator marked only the atypical vocal production (Metalinguistic domain), while the other also considered the action itself a Social Convention violation, as it involved an undesired or inappropriate behaviour in that specific context. An additional example, not involving multiple SOs, involves a case in which the child suggested that it was the stuffed toy's turn to cook. In this instance, one annotator coded the humorous incongruity as belonging to the Object Properties domain (as stuffed toys cannot cook) while the other annotated only for the incongruity related to the Social Convention domain (as cooking is typically an activity carried out by human adults).

# Appendix C. Laughter occurrence probability in relation to humour episodes

## C.1. Coefficients logistic regressions

In the following two tables (Table C.4 and Table C.5) we report the results of the logistic regression with Helmert contrast mentioned in Section 4.2. In the first part of the table we report the coefficients relative to each factor and contrast singularly, while in the second part we report the interactions between each of the contrasts and participant (Mother vs Child) (see Fig. C.6).

<table><caption>**Table C.4**
Results of the Logistic Regression with Helmert contrast predicting presence of laughter.</caption><thead><tr><th>Contrast</th><th>Estimate</th><th>Std. Error</th><th>z value</th><th>Pr(&gt; |z|)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>(Intercept)</td><td>-5.8782</td><td>0.1067</td><td>-55.106</td><td>&lt;.001***</td></tr><tr><td>(1) 18 vs.12</td><td>-0.3471</td><td>0.2043</td><td>-1.699</td><td>0.0893</td></tr><tr><td>(2) 24 vs. (12 + 18)/2</td><td>0.3085</td><td>0.0901</td><td>3.423</td><td>0.0006***</td></tr><tr><td>(3) 30 vs. (12 + 18 + 24)/3</td><td>-0.0044</td><td>0.0712</td><td>-0.061</td><td>0.9512</td></tr><tr><td>(4) 36 vs. (12 + 18 + 24 + 30)/4</td><td>0.1536</td><td>0.0416</td><td>3.694</td><td>0.0002***</td></tr><tr><td>Mum vs. Child</td><td>0.4318</td><td>0.1343</td><td>3.215</td><td>0.0013**</td></tr><tr><td>(1) Mum vs. Child</td><td>0.0988</td><td>0.2406</td><td>0.411</td><td>0.6814</td></tr><tr><td>(2) Mum vs. Child</td><td>-0.2507</td><td>0.1134</td><td>-2.211</td><td>0.0271*</td></tr><tr><td>(3) Mum vs. Child</td><td>-0.0822</td><td>0.0911</td><td>-0.902</td><td>0.3671</td></tr><tr><td>(4) Mum vs. Child</td><td>-0.1608</td><td>0.0583</td><td>-2.757</td><td>0.0058**</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><caption>**Table C.5**
Results of the Logistic Regression with Helmert contrast predicting the presence of child laughter related to humorous episodes produced by children themselves.</caption><thead><tr><th>Predictor</th><th>Estimate</th><th>Std. Error</th><th>z value</th><th>Pr(&gt; |z|)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>(Intercept)</td><td>-7.4385</td><td>0.2642</td><td>-28.155</td><td>&lt;.001***</td></tr><tr><td>age_m1</td><td>0.5495</td><td>0.5774</td><td>0.952</td><td>0.3412</td></tr><tr><td>age_m2</td><td>0.5852</td><td>0.2195</td><td>2.666</td><td>0.0077**</td></tr><tr><td>age_m3</td><td>0.1192</td><td>0.1499</td><td>0.795</td><td>0.4267</td></tr><tr><td>age_m4</td><td>0.1893</td><td>0.0924</td><td>2.049</td><td>0.0405*</td></tr></tbody></table>
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Fig. C.6. Number of laughter occurrences related to humorous episodes in mothers and children over time. Each time point illustrated on the right of the x-axis is compared to the average of all the preceding time points analysed.</figcaption></figure>

## Appendix D. Hyperlinks to Extracts' videos

* Extract 1: Example from the Providence Corpus - Naima 010014
  https://osf.io/u7e6d

* Extract 2: Example from the Providence Corpus - William 010412
  https://osf.io/hr8g3

* Extract 3: Example from the Providence Corpus - William 010412
  https://osf.io/6gzk7

* Extract 4: Example from the Providence Corpus - Alex 020606
  https://osf.io/wsprg

* Extract 5: Example from the Providence Corpus - Naima 030101
  https://osf.io/3d2qx

* Extract 6: Example from the Providence Corpus - Naima 010604
  https://osf.io/4ryuz

* Extract 7: Example from the Providence Corpus - Naima 010604
  https://osf.io/qdxpy

## Appendix E. Script Opposition and Knowledge Domain in humorous episodes by origin/producer

See Figs. E.7 and E.8.

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Fig. E.7. SOs involved in humour episodes appreciated and produced by Children and Mothers.</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Fig. E.8. Domains involved in humour episodes appreciated and produced by Children and Mothers.</figcaption></figure>

## Data availability

Audios, videos and transcripts are accessible via the CHILDES database at https://phon.talkbank.org/access/Eng-NA/Providence.html. All the annotations and scripts used in the current study are publicly available at https://osf.io/3b8uh/.

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