Laughter in Dialogues with Normal-Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Children: Do they all laugh alike?

Chiara Mazzocconi (1, 2, 3, 4) , Céline Hidalgo (1, 4) , Roxane Bertrand (2, 3, 4) , Leonardo Lancia (2, 4) , Stéphane Roman (5) , Daniele Schon (1, 3, 4)

1 INS - Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes
2 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage
3 ILCB - Institute of Language, Communication and the Brain
4 AMU - Aix Marseille Université
5 TIMONE - Hôpital de la Timone [CHU - APHM]

Despite the technological advancements, children with prostheses or cochlear implants, even when early implanted, show heterogeneous language skills and often struggle with pragmatic communication aspects. In our study, we focus on exploring laughter use and responsiveness to others' laughter in dialogue, comparing Normal-Hearing (N=13) and Hearing-Impaired (N=9) children while engaged in a series of conversational tasks with an adult experimenter. We observe significant differences between groups in the amount of conversational tasks complete in the allocated time and in terms of laughter frequency, speech-laughter and laughter mimicry occurrences. We discuss the observations on children and adult behaviour in relation to previous literature in adult-adult and child-caregiver interaction. Our results support the hypothesis that laughter use and responsiveness in dialogue might be related to pragmatic competences and informative about conversational quality.

Domaines: Linguistique; Sciences cognitives

Chiara Mazzocconi, Céline Hidalgo, Roxane Bertrand, Leonardo Lancia, Stéphane Roman, et al.. Laughter in Dialogues with Normal-Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Children: Do they all laugh alike?. Proceedings of the 28th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Raffaella Bernardi, Ellen Breitholtz, Giuseppe Riccardi, Sep 2024, Rovereto (Italie), Italy. ⟨hal-04699996⟩