Joke identification, comprehension and appreciation by Spanish intermediate ESL learners: an exploratory study

http://dx.doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2022.10.1.633 The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) 108–133 www.europeanjournalofhumour.org Joke identification, comprehension and appreciation by Spanish intermediate ESL learners: an exploratory study Santiago Arróniz Parra Indiana University, Indiana [email protected] Manuel Padilla Cruz Universidad de Sevilla, Spain [email protected] Abstract This paper reports on an exploratory study examining joke identification, appreciation and comprehension by Spanish intermediate ESL learners. The study is based on a relevance-theoretic classification of jokes, which assumes that humorousness results from manipulation of three parameters: make-sense frames, cultural information and utterance interpretation. It firstly ascertains whether Spanish ESL learners recognise orally-delivered samples of seven types of purportedly jocular texts. Secondly, it examines whether these learners actually regard such texts as comical and why. Finally, it looks into the learners’ interpretative problems in order to single out which joke type(s) is/are more challenging. The study relies on quantitative and qualitative data elicited through an online questionnaire comprising four tasks. The results indicate no correlation between joke identification and appreciation, and independence of successful joke recognition from sophisticated interpretative skills. Jokes involving invalidation of an activated make-sense frame were most easily identified and found most funny, but jokes exploiting cancellation of an initial, seemingly plausible, interpretation posed more difficulties. Keywords: ESL learners, relevance theory, joke identification, joke comprehension, joke appreciation. 1. Introduction Humour is often intentionally sought through varied and complex texts like jokes (Attardo & Chabanne 1992; Chiaro 1992; Yus 1997, 2003, 2013a, 2016; Davies 1998, 2011; Dynel 2011). In addition to breaking the ice and releasing tensions, they also facilitate and mitigate certain actions, create and project identities, or boost relations thanks to personal revelations, expression of affinities and/or celebration of shared experiences (Attardo 2002; Norrick 2003; Habib 2008; The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 109 Yus Ramos 2016). Fulfilment of these socially beneficial functions depends on what is said and how it is presented, but, more importantly, on comprehension. Indeed, jokes may fail because of mistiming in delivery and processing, lexical and/or syntactic complexity, uniqueness or unexpectedness, inability to grasp pragmatic force and/or recognise comical frames (Bell & Attardo 2010). Nevertheless, joke comprehension has proven difficult to unravel (Suls 1983; Graesser et al. 1989; Bell 2007b; Kozbelt & Nishioka 2010). A wealth of inquiries has looked into humour comprehension by children (McGhee 1971a, 1971b; Klein 1985; Masten 1986), children with nonverbal learning disabilities and reading disabilities (Semrud-Clikeman & Glass 2008), language-impaired adolescents (Spector 1990), adolescents with autism and Asperger’s syndrome (Emerich et al. 2003), adults and elderly people (Schaier & Cicirelli 1976; Mak & Carpenter 2007) or patients with brain damage (Bihrle et al. 1986). Regrettably, there is a remarkable paucity of studies focusing on non-natives and second language (henceforth SL) learners. Even in the case of highly competent learners, they may fail to perceive, understand and/or appreciate humour produced in their SL (Bell & Attardo 2010: 424). One existing study addresses reading comprehension and analyses the impact of proficiency and ability to detect certain text properties on humour apprehension (Shardakova 2016). Another study targets conversational humour and shows SL learners’ comprehension problems due to cultural factors, vocabulary, speed of talk, unexpected combinations of elements, unique turns of phrase, unpredictability of humour introduction and/or failure to clearly perceive a purpose (Bell & Attardo 2010). Although such problems are sometimes avoided through speech adjustments and elimination of potentially challenging forms (Bell 2007a), comprehension difficulties nevertheless do not preclude humour appreciation (Bell 2007b). Unfortunately, no study has yet delved into how SL learners understand orally delivered jokes. The current investigation aims to start filling this gap by centring on Spanish learners of English as an SL (ESL, henceforth). Humour comprehension depends at least on text recognition, proper understanding and expected appreciation (Hay 2001; Bell & Attardo 2010). Therefore, this study seeks to elucidate if the said learners (i) identify jokes, (ii) appreciate their intended funniness, (iii) face difficulties with understanding various types of jokes, and, if so, (iv) which type(s) of jokes pose(s) difficulties and why. Like many other manifestations of humour, jokes have been approached from frameworks and perspectives ranging from Gricean pragmatics (e.g., Attardo 1990, 1993, 1994) or superiority and relief (or release) theories (Morreall 1987, 2009) to models based on incongruity-resolution (Suls 1977, 1983), such bisociation theory (Koestler 1964) or forced reinterpretation model (Ritchie 2004, 2006). However, the current investigation is informed, on the one hand, by the relevance-theoretic approach to jokes, which portrays them as scarcely informative texts whose relevance resides in the non-propositional effects that they generate: humour, amusement, entertainment, etc. (Yus Ramos 2016; Zuo 2020). On the other hand, it is based on a relevance-theoretic taxonomy of jokes, which differentiates seven joke types (JT, henceforth) according to three parameters intervening in the generation of laughter and amusement (Yus Ramos 2013a, 2013b, 2016). In contrast to studies analysing data from diaries or interviews (Bell 2007a, 2007b; Bell & Attardo 2010), this investigation relies on quantitative and qualitative data collected by means of a questionnaire. It exposes the participants to recorded JT examples and elicits information regarding recognition, appreciation and comprehension. Section 2 briefly summarises the relevance-theoretic approach to jokes, while Section 3 introduces the said classification of jokes. Next, Section 4 explains the methodology developed for the study. Its data are quantitatively and qualitatively analysed and discussed in Section 5, while Section 6 comments on some limitations. Finally, Section 7 offers some conclusions and directions for future research. The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 110 2. Jokes in relevance-theoretic pragmatics The relevance-theoretic approach to jokes incorporates insights from incongruity-resolution models (Koestler 1964; Suls 1977; Ritchie 2004, 2006). It argues that jokes favour a rather salient (Giora 1998, 1999), likely and effortless interpretation in the initial or multiple-graded- interpretations (MGI) part (Yus Ramos 2003: 1309). That interpretation appears relevant because it yields a satisfactory cognitive benefit in return for the invested effort (Sperber & Wilson 1986, 1995; Wilson & Sperber 2004). Yet, the subsequent introduction of an incongruity renders it implausible. Resolution of the incongruity requires additional effort to consider a less accessible, perhaps unlikely, interpretation, which is nonetheless compatible with the text (Jodłowiec 1991; Curcó 1995, 1997). This is formulated in the final or single-covert- interpretation (SCI) part (Yus Ramos 2003: 1309) as a consequence of the tendencies to solve incongruities and to attain optimal relevance (Yus Ramos 2016: 307). Accordingly, (1) initially privileges the interpretation that the butler is taking off the clothes that the woman is wearing. This interpretation must be replaced at the end with the less likely one that the butler is wearing the woman’s clothes and must take them off: (1) A wealthy couple had planned to go out for the evening. The woman of the house decided to give their butler, Jeeves, the rest of the night off. She said they would be home very late, and that he should just enjoy his evening. As it turned out, however, the wife wasn’t having a good time at the party, so she came home early, alone. As the woman walked into her house, she saw Jeeves sitting by himself in the dining room. She called for him to follow her, and led him into the master bedroom. She then closed and locked the door. She looked at him and smiled. “Jeeves,” she said. “Take off my dress.” He did this carefully. “Jeeves,” she continued. “Take off my stockings and garter.” He silently obeyed her. “Jeeves,” she then said. “Remove my bra and panties.” As he did this, the tension continued to mount. She looked at him and then said, “Jeeves, if I ever catch you wearing my clothes again, you’re fired!”. (adapted from Yus Ramos 2003: 1310) Many jokes exploit pragmatic ambivalence by taking advantage of the possible outputs of mutual parallel adjustment, which is the series of mental tasks on which utterance interpretation relies (Wilson & Sperber 2004). Their words, phrases or sentences may be disambiguated, adjusted or assigned reference differently, and/or their sentences may be enriched with distinct unarticulated constituents. This is the case of (2), which plays with the ambiguity of ‘denomination’ as ‘monetary value’ or ‘confession’: (2) A person walks into the post office to buy stamps for their Christmas cards. “What denomination?” asks the clerk. “Oh, good heavens! Have we come to this?” said the person. “Well, give me 50 Baptist and 50 Catholic and one Methodist”. Still, other jokes provoke clashes between make-sense frames1 and/or cultural information supplied as premises in inference. Thus, (3) confronts frames and assumptions concerning how charming old ladies treat their pets with how the one in the joke actually treated her cat, the behaviour and passion of beautiful young princesses with those of an old lady, and/or the physical condition and capabilities of good-looking men with those of the prince in the joke: (3) An old lady sits on her front porch, rocking away the last days of her long life, when all of a sudden, a fairy godmother appears and informs her that she will be granted three wishes. “Well, now,” says the old lady, “I guess I would like to be really rich.” *** POOF *** Her rocking chair turns to solid gold. “And, gee, I guess I wouldn’t mind being a young, beautiful princess.” 1 These are stereotypical scenarios endowing texts with meaningfulness. They comprise word-associated schemas, sequence-associated scripts about events, and situation-associated frames. The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 111 *** POOF *** She turns into a beautiful young woman. “Your third wish?” asks the fairy godmother. Just then the old woman’s cat wanders across the porch in front of them. “Ooh - can you change him into a handsome prince?” she asks. *** POOF *** There before her stands a young man more handsome than anyone could possibly imagine. She stares at him, smitten. With a smile that makes her knees weak, he saunters across the porch and whispers in her ear, “Bet you’re sorry you had me neutered.” In relevance-theoretic pragmatics, jokes are considered deceitful texts. Humorists predict information available and anticipate the inferential steps that are likely to be taken. Humour arises when the audience detects the inadequacy of entertained beliefs, make-sense frames and/or the output of specific pragmatic tasks, and realises the plausibility mistakenly granted to them (Yus Ramos 2003, 2013a, 2013b, 2016). This is possible thanks to their epistemic vigilance of the reliability and viability of information (Mascaro & Sperber 2009; Sperber et al. 2010), and their hermeneutical vigilance of the well-formedness and reasonability of interpretations (Padilla Cruz 2015, 2016). 3. Joke types Three parameters are essential in joke creation: (i) utterance interpretation, (ii) make-sense frames, and (iii) cultural information (Yus Ramos 2016: 117). They may be exploited jointly or separately for the sake of humour. Despite the different classifications of jokes proposed on the grounds of varied criteria (Suls 1977, 1983; Ritchie 2004, 2006; Yus Ramos 2003; Dynel 2012), a more naturalistic one must consider the manipulation of such parameters and the crucial role of inference in the interpretation of jokes. Hence, such a classification needs to differentiate between “[…] jokes whose humorous effects lie in the steps leading to an interpretation […] and jokes whose humour is based on cultural and collective information stored in the hearer’s mind” (Yus Ramos 2016: 115). The possible combinations of such parameters yield a seventype taxonomy of jokes known as the Intersecting Circles Model (Yus Ramos 2013a, 2016). The seven types are: a) Jokes cancelling an activated make-sense frame, cultural information and an interpretation: (4) As an airplane is about to crash, a female passenger jumps up frantically and announces, “If I’m going to die, I want to die feeling like a woman.” She removes all her clothing and asks, “Is there someone on this plane who is man enough to make me feel like a woman?” A man stands up, removes his shirt and says, “Here, iron this”. (Yus Ramos 2016: 126-127) The incongruity introduced by the man’s imperative in a catastrophe frame forces a shift to a sexist frame. Additionally, “die feeling like a woman” (“making love with a man”) and the denotation of ‘man’ (“good lover”) and ‘woman’ (“woman being given full sexual pleasure”) need to be adjusted differently. b) Jokes invalidating a make-sense frame and cultural information: (5) Late one night, a mugger wearing a mask jumped into the path of a well-dressed man and stuck a gun in his ribs. “Give me your money,” he demanded. Indignant, the affluent man replied, “You can’t do this. I’m a politician!” “In that case,” replied the robber, “give me MY money!”. (Yus Ramos 2016: 127-128) The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 112 The victim’s refusal to give his money to the mugger contradicts a typical situation where muggers intimidate and get money. Hearers need to activate another frame where the mugger does not do wrong because the victim is a politician who might have embezzled money. c) Jokes activating a make-sense frame favouring an interpretation, both of which must be subsequently abandoned: (6) On the night of their honeymoon, a newlywed couple had an unfortunate accident, resulting in the amputation of the groom’s left foot. Unable to control her grief, the bride called her mother from the hospital. “Mother,” she sobbed, “My husband has only one foot.” The mother, trying to console her daughter said, “That’s alright dear, your father has only six inches”. (Yus Ramos 2016: 128-131) Replacement of the sense of ‘foot’ with unit of length must be motivated by a shift from a hospital frame to one connected with sex. d) Jokes depending on a shift of make-sense frame: (7) A man was drinking in a bar when he noticed this beautiful young lady sitting next to him. “Hello there”, says the man, “and what is your name?” “Hello,” giggles the woman, “I’m Stacey. What’s yours?” “I’m Jim.” “Jim, do you want to come over to my house tonight? I mean, right now??” “Sure!” replies Jim, “Let’s go!” So Stacey takes Jim to her house and takes him to her room. Jim sits down on the bed and notices a picture of a man on Stacey’s desk. “Stacey, I noticed the picture of a man on your desk,” Jim says. “Yes? And what about it?” asks Stacey. “Is it your brother?” “No, it isn’t, Jim!” Stacey giggles. Jim’s eyes widen, suspecting that it might be Stacey’s husband. When he finally asks, “Is it your husband?” Stacey giggles even more, “No, silly!!” Jim was relieved. “Then, it might be your boyfriend!” Stacey giggles even more while nibbling on Jim’s ear. She says, “No, silly!!” “Then, who is it?” Jim asks. Stacey replies, “That’s me before my operation!!” (Yus Ramos 2016: 132-133) Funniness stems from rejection of the frame “man meets woman at a bar” upon hearing that the man in the picture was the woman. e) Jokes relying on cultural information strengthening a stereotype and the invalidation of an interpretation: (8) Following a bitter divorce, a husband saw his wife at a party and sneered, “You know, I was a fool when I married you”. The wife simply sighed and replied, “Yes, dear, I know, but I was in love and didn’t really notice.” (Yus Ramos 2016: 132) Disambiguation of ‘fool’ as “lacking sense” should reinforce the stereotype of marriage being troublesome. However, this disambiguation needs abandoning in favour of “stupid or silly person”, which also fits the overall context. f) Jokes solely strengthening or weakening cultural information about stereotypes: (9) A man lost both ears in an accident. No plastic surgeon could offer him a solution. He heard of a very good one in Sweden, and went to him. The new surgeon examined him, thought a while, and said, “Yes, I can put you right”. After the operation, bandages off, stitches out, he goes to his hotel. The morning after, in a rage, he calls his surgeon, and yells, “You swine, you gave me a woman’s ears.” “Well, an ear is an ear. It makes no difference whether it is a man’s or a woman’s.” “You’re wrong. I hear everything, but I don’t understand a thing!”. The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 113 (Yus Ramos 2016: 133) Comicality could result from reinforcement of the negative and disrespectful stereotype that women allegedly do not understand. g) Jokes biasing plausible interpretations that must be annulled: (10) A lady went into a clothing store and asked, “May I try on that dress in the shop window?” “Well,” replied the sales clerk doubtfully, “don’t you think it would be better to use the dressing room?” (Yus Ramos 2016: 133) Hearers should notice the readings “[try on that dress (that is) in the shop window]” and “[try on that dress] [in the shop window]”. Tested against a 1000-joke corpus (Yus Ramos 2013b), this taxonomy may aid analysis of joke identification, comprehension and appreciation in interlanguage and intercultural pragmatics studies. It captures distinct humour-generating tactics that may be opaque or pose difficulties to SL learners due to unawareness of beliefs and/or frames, cross-cultural differences in their contents and/or idiosyncratic meaning-form mappings, and hence prevent humorousness detection and appreciation. What follows reports on a study based on this taxonomy. It ascertains if Spanish ESL learners (i) identify jokes in their target language, (ii) appreciate their jocularity, (iii) experience comprehension problems and, if so, (iv) which JT(s) is/are easier to understand. 4. Methodology Since this study focuses on comprehension, it endorses a receptive data approach and relies on pragmatic comprehension tasks (Bouton 1994, 1999; Bardovi-Harlig & Bastos 2010; Taguchi 2011a, 2011b, 2017). Data were elicited through an online questionnaire comprising recognition, appreciation and non-interactive meta-pragmatic tasks. 4.1. Questionnaire Developed with the Qualtrics (Provo, UT) software, the questionnaire comprised audio input and various tasks. These were arranged on individual web pages in order to facilitate their administration through smartphones and computers. An introductory page gave information about the tasks and solicited consent to participate. The second page was a volume adjustment test (Appendix A). Then, nine sets of two pages followed. Two of the sets included in the first page recorded narrative texts with no humorous intent. They served as distractors. The first page of the other seven sets contained a recording of one sample of each JT. These were examples (4)-(10) from Yus Ramos (2016) illustrating the discussion in Section 3. Recordings were made by one male and two female native speakers from the Midwestern United States. They had been trained so as to balance delivery and avoid prosody mismatch. No effect of gender factors was expected. Written transcripts were not supplied in order to prevent participants from (re-)reading joke texts, which would have diminished data reliability. Rather, participants had to attend to oral features that impact comprehension, such as prosody. Input delivery on separate pages enabled control of exposure time, as the software records the time spent on each page and tracks whether recordings were played more than once (Appendix B). Indeed, participants had to listen to the recordings only once. The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 114 The second page in each set presented four tasks. Completion of these was necessary to continue. They consisted of five questions, three of which gathered data amenable to quantitative analysis, while the remaining two elicited data amenable to qualitative analysis (Appendix C): - Task 1 required answering two questions. Question 1a was a multiple-choice asking to describe input as ‘boring’, ‘repetitive’, ‘confusing’, ‘humorous’, ‘informative’ and/or ‘absurd’. Multiple selection was possible and ‘humorous’ confirmed joke appreciation, a requisite for humour comprehension (Hay 2001; Bell & Attardo 2010). Question 1b enquired about choice rationale. - Task 2 involved placing a slider on a scale ranging from 0 (‘nonunderstanding’) to 100 (‘full understanding’). Although the scores were not intended to reflect actual comprehension, they shed light onto JT difficulty. - Task 3 elicited brief accounts of the easiness/difficulty of each recording. Since comprehension troubles may prevent joke appreciation (Hay 2001; Bell 2007b; Bell & Attardo 2010), the responses to this task will be correlated with those to Question 1a. - Task 4 entailed input identification through a multiple-choice. Participants chose from among ‘story’, ‘anecdote’, ‘joke’, ‘news’, ‘interview’, ‘letter’, ‘advertisement’ or ‘political discourse’. Correct selection of ‘joke’ revealed successful identification, another requisite for humour comprehension (Hay 2001; Bell & Attardo 2010). To conclude, participants were asked demographic information, previous experience with English –including proficiency level as certified by an official institution or the courses passed in the School of Philology at Universidad de Sevilla– participation in study-abroad programs, work experience in a foreign country and an estimate of the hours per week spent in contact with English outside of class. These factors might impact the results (Appendix D). 4.2. Participants The participants were 49 Spanish undergraduates with a B2 level of English, according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, henceforth). This choice was motivated by the correlation found between proficiency and comprehension (Taguchi, 2012). Furthermore, lack of linguistic and cultural knowledge at lower levels could have hindered understanding the recordings. 38 participants were women and 11 were men. Ages ranged between 19 and 22, with a mean average of 19.76. They were taking upper-division courses of the Degree in English Studies at Universidad de Sevilla. They were recruited from “Inglés Instrumental I” (“Instrumental English I”), a general second-year, advanced-level course (CEFR C1). Their proficiency level was certified by their institution upon completion of “Lengua Inglesa I” (“English Language I”), a general upper-intermediate, CEFR B2-level English course compulsory for all first-year students. 4.3. Data collection One of the researchers contacted an instructor teaching two groups of the said course on March 2019 and asked for permission to use the last 30 minutes of two sessions in order to solicit participation. In April, the researcher visited the classes and informed the students about the investigation without revealing its purpose. Next, he projected on the display a slide with a QR code along with a URL to a blog post, which gave access to the questionnaire (Appendix E). He then explained the instructions: students had to (i) consent to participate, (ii) complete the questionnaire individually, (iii) listen to recordings only once, with headphones if necessary, and (iv) do each task. Students using smartphones scanned the QR code, while those using a The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 115 laptop typed the URL into their browser. The researcher also answered questions about the tasks and requested that participants notify him of technical problems. 4.4. Data analysis For quantitative purposes, responses were coded depending on (i) whether ‘humorous’ –a categorical binary factor– was selected in Question 1a, (ii) the acknowledged degree of comprehension in Task 2 –a continuous factor– and (iii) whether ‘joke’ –another binary factor– was selected in Task 4. Comparison and contrast of the responses determined if jokes were identified and appreciated, as well as the type(s) involving more difficulties. In turn, responses to Question 1b and Task 3 were analysed qualitatively on the grounds of explicit allusions to humour or the parameters intervening in joke construction. Irrelevant responses were disregarded. 5. Analysis and discussion 5.1. Quantitative analysis Overall, responses reveal that jokes tended to be understood by Spanish B2-level ESL students. 63.8% of the participants (31/49) correctly identified the recordings containing them and found them funny. Responses to Question 1a indicate that JT examples exploiting invalidation of make-sense frames triggered the highest percentages of humour appreciation (see Table 1). Indeed, 81.6% of participants (40/49) selected ‘humorous’ for that of JT#3 [make-sense frame + utterance interpretation], 71.4% (35/49) for that of JT#4 [make-sense frame], 67.3% (33/49) for that of JT#2 [make-sense frame + cultural information] and 63.3% (31/49) for that of JT#1 [make-sense frame + cultural information + utterance interpretation]. However, the JT#1 example was considered ‘absurd’ by 67.3% (33/49) participants. In contrast, only 20.4% (10/49) and 28.6% (15/49) of participants evaluated the examples of JT#6 [cultural information] and JT#7 [utterance interpretation] respectively as funny. Table 1. Results from Question 1a JT ‘boring’ ‘repetitive’ ‘confusing’ ‘humorous’ ‘informative’ ‘absurd’ % n % n % n % n % n % n #1 4.1 2 12.2 6 49.0 24 63.3 31 14.3 7 7.3 33 #2 4.1 2 10.2 5 8.2 4 67.3 33 36.7 18 26.5 13 #3 12.2 6 2.0 1 26.5 13 81.6 40 26.5 13 1.0 25 #4 12.2 6 34.7 17 6.1 3 71.4 35 16.3 8 2.7 16 #5 26.5 13 8.2 4 26.5 13 51.0 25 26.5 13 8.6 14 #6 34.7 17 16.3 8 24.5 12 20.4 10 24.5 12 7.1 28 #7 44.9 22 4.1 2 57.1 28 28.6 15 14.3 7 1.0 26 The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 116 Self-assessments of joke comprehension in Task 2 averaged over 80% for most JT examples (see Table 2). That of JT#4, which alters the mugging make-sense frame, ranks highest with an average of 98.2%. It is followed by JT#3 example, which cancels the hospital frame and the measurement-unit sense of ‘foot’, with an average of 90.2%. For the rest of JT examples, participants deemed their comprehension between 84.2% and 88.7%. The exception was JT#7 example. Table 2. Results from Task 2 In Task 4, 63.8% of participants correctly identified the recordings containing jokes, but selection of ‘anecdote’ by 23.6% evidences trouble (see Table 3). JT#3 and JT#4 examples achieve the highest rates of identification, thus matching the scores for Question 1a. However, JT#1, JT#2 and JT#5 examples exhibit lower scores: 44.9% (22/49), 55.1% (27/49) and 59.2% (29/49), respectively. Table 3. Results from Task 4 JT % #1 [Make-sense frame + cultural frame + utterance interpretation] 86.2 #2 [Make-sense frame + cultural frame] 86.9 #3 [Make-sense frame + utterance interpretation] 90.2 #4 [Make-sense frame] 98.2 #5 [Cultural frame + utterance interpretation] 88.7 #6 [Cultural frame] 84.2 #7 [Utterance interpretation] 59.2 JT Joke Anecdote News Tale Interview Letter Ad Political Discourse % n % n % n % n % n % n % n % n #1. 44.9 22 44.9 22 2.0 1 6.1 3 2.0 1 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 #2. 55.1 27 20.4 10 14.3 7 8.2 4 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 2.0 1 #3. 81.6 40 16.3 8 2.0 1 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 #4. 75.5 37 10.2 5 0.0 0 14.3 7 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 #5. 59.2 29 24.5 12 2.0 1 10.2 5 2.0 1 0.0 0 2.0 1 0.0 0 #6. 69.4 34 18.4 9 6.1 3 4.1 2 0.0 0 2.0 1 0.0 0 0.0 0 #7. 61.2 30 30.6 15 2.0 1 4.1 2 0.0 0 2.0 1 0.0 0 0.0 0 Mean 63.8 23.6 4.1 6.7 0.6 0.6 0.3 0.3 The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 123 Powered by Qualtrics ¡Bienvenidos a esta investigación! Mi nombre es Santiago Arróniz y estoy llevando a cabo una investigación para mi Trabajo Fin de Máster en la Facultad de Filología. La realización del estudio le llevará alrededor de 15-20 minutos. Su participación en esta investigación es voluntaria. Tiene el derecho a retirarse en cualquier momento durante el estudio, por cualquier razón y sin ningún tipo de prejuicio. Cualquier dato que proporcione durante la realización de la misma será tratado de forma totalmente anónima y con un fin exclusivamente estadístico y de investigación. Si desea ponerse en contacto con el investigador principal del estudio para hablar sobre esta investigación, envíe un correo electrónico a [email protected] Al hacer clic en el siguiente botón, reconoce que su participación en el estudio es voluntaria, tiene más de18 años de edad y sabe que puede decidir dar por finalizada su participación en el estudio en cualquier momento y por cualquier razón. Tenga en cuenta que esta encuesta se mostrará mejor en un ordenador portátil o de escritorio. Algunas características podrían ser menos compatibles para su uso en un dispositivo móvil. Es muy recomendable usar auriculares durante todo el estudio. Si llega a tener algún tipo de problema técnico al cargar la página, pruebe a refrescarla. Si persiste, póngase en contacto con el investigador. No retroceda de página durante el estudio. Puede responder a las preguntas en español o inglés. ¡Muchas gracias! He comprendido la finalidad de este estudio, cómo se usarán mis datos y doy mi consentimiento para llevar a cabo la investigación. →  Pá The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 124 The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 125 Appendix B Questionnaire beginning: Powered by Qualtrics AHORA DA COMIENZO EL CUESTIONARIO POR FAVOR, RESPONDA CON SINCERIDAD A TODAS LAS PREGUNTAS HAGA CLICK EN LA FLECHA PARA CONTINUAR →  Pá The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 126 Appendix C Questionnaire tasks and questions: The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 127 Appendix D Background questionnaire: The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 128 The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (1) Open-access journal | www.europeanjournalofhumour.org 129 Appendix E Slide with the QR code and the URL address to access the questionnaire: References Attardo, S. 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