The relationship between humor comprehension and syntax in children with language impairment

The current study considers different types of grammatical structures (simple, relative clause, passive) and incorporates them into a humor task to investigate the interaction of grammatical complexity and the comprehension of humor. Two groups of children, those who are language impaired (LI) and those who are typically developing (TD), participated in an experimental task to examine their ability to comprehend humor presented visually with no language and humor presented verbally that varies in linguistic complexity. It was found that children with LI more readily comprehend humor when it is presented through pictures. In addition, this group exhibited a greater difficulty comprehending linguistic humor, but no significant differences in performance between the varying levels of syntactic complexity were found. Both groups showed a similar pattern of performance on the task, with the TD group performing more accurately on the complex sentence conditions. All children tested broke down on language tasks that included elevated levels of syntactic complexity. The use of visuals for any language task may aid in comprehension.Education, Communicative Sciences and Disorder