The development of children's comprehension and appreciation of riddles

Humor appreciation and understanding is important for children’s social relationships. The current study examined the associations between riddle comprehension, riddle appreciation, and smiling/laughter in children from a wide age-range aged 4 to 11 years old, as well as how cognitive processing style relates to riddle comprehension. Style was distinguished between local and global language processing at the sentence level. The results showed that only children above the age of 8 years old showed a reliable relationship between humor comprehension and smiling/laughter. These findings show that laughter should not be taken as an automatic indicator of explicit understanding. In addition, higher vocabulary ability was independently associated with better humor comprehension. This demonstrates a separable role language proficiency in humor comprehension and suggests avenues for future research in atypical populations known to have difficulties in this area