Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

While separate pieces of research found parents offer toddlers cues to express that they are joking and pretending, and that toddlers and preschoolers understand intentions to joke and pretend, it is not yet clear whether parents and toddlers consider joking and pretending to be distinct concepts. This is important as distinguishing these two forms of non-literal acts could open a gateway to understanding the complexities of the non-literal world, as well as the complexities of intentions in general. Two studies found (...) parents offer explicit cues to help 16- to 24-month-olds distinguish pretending and joking. Across an action play study and a verbal play study parents showed more disbelief and less belief through their actions and language when joking versus pretending. Similarly, toddlers showed less belief through their actions, and older toddlers showed less belief through their language. Toddlers' disbelief could be accounted for by their response to parents' language and actions. Thus, these studies reveal a mechanism by which toddlers learn to distinguish joking and pretending. Parents offer explicit cues to distinguish these intentions, and toddlers use these cues to guide their own behaviors, which in turn allows toddlers to distinguish these intentional contexts. (shrink)

We investigated humor as a context for learning about abstraction and disbelief. More specifically, we investigated how parents support humor understanding during book sharing with their toddlers. In Study 1, a corpus analysis revealed that in books aimed at 1‐to 2‐year‐olds, humor is found more often than other forms of doing the wrong thing including mistakes, pretense, lying, false beliefs, and metaphors. In Study 2, 20 parents read a book containing humorous and non‐humorous pages to their 19‐to 26‐month‐olds. Parents used (...) a significantly higher percentage of high abstraction extra‐textual utterances (ETUs) when reading the humorous pages. In Study 3, 41 parents read either a humorous or non‐humorous book to their 18‐to 24‐month‐olds. Parents reading the humorous book made significantly more ETUs coded for a specific form of high abstraction: those encouraging disbelief of prior utterances. Sharing humorous books thus increases toddlers' exposure to high abstraction and belief‐based language. (shrink)