Abstract
Verbal humor is very much a part of everyday life, so it is not surprising that even young children laugh at riddles and jokes. They also invent their own, but these are perplexing. Here is an example from a five-year old of our acquaintance:
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Child: What has a trunk and four wheels?
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Us: I don’t know. What has a trunk and four wheels?
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Child: A car! (hilarious laughter)
Despite manifest facility with the riddle format, this child apparently is unaware that riddles, at least good riddles, turn on linguistic ambiguity. At the same time, it is easy to show that children of this age are in perceptual and productive control of two senses for a single word (e.g., the two meanings of bark or club) or constructions (e.g., the two meanings of flying planes). This is one of many instances where children display competence in speech and understanding, but fail when the task is to see through to the linguistic event itself, manipulating it in the service of providing a judgment. Briefly, while the youngster is sensitive to potential alternate interpretations of speech signals, he cannot answer to the fact that some single speech event can be interpreted in two ways. He cannot give judgments concerning ambiguity.
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Hirsh-Pasek, K., Gleitman, L.R., Gleitman, H. (1978). What Did the Brain Say to the Mind? A Study of the Detection and Report of Ambiguity by Young Children. In: Sinclair, A., Jarvella, R.J., Levelt, W.J.M. (eds) The Child’s Conception of Language. Springer Series in Language and Communication, vol 2. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-67155-5_7
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