Analysis of humor in a corpus of spontaneous child speech

This paper analyses the humorous capacity in children aged 3;0 to 6;0 in their interactions with adults and peers, collected in a Spanish corpus of spontaneous child speech. The methodological framework is in line with the one proposed by Timofeeva-Timofeev (2017), based on the six stages suggested by McGhee (1979) and resorts to the theories of humour origin (Meyer 2000) and to the types of incongruity enjoyed by children (Klein 2003) to analyse data. Results show an increase of humorous verbal situations as well as of the pragmatic complexity of them from 3;0 to 6;0 year-olds, especially from 5;0 years old onwards, when children's speech shows a higher metapragmatic competence (Gombert 1992).