Humour in deaf children and teenagers with cochlear implants: means and topics

Résumé En

In deaf people who use Sign Languages, humour has been looked at extensively, evidencing the favorite means (such as puns on similar looking signs) and topics in deaf humour (Cancio-Bello 2015, Sutton-Spence & Napoli 2009). But humour has been shown to be very difficult to deal with for the deaf who use oral languages (usually referred to as the Oral Deaf) and who have poor hearing benefit provided by analogic hearing aids (Vincent-Durroux 2014). Humour remains to be further examined in deaf people with cochlear implants, which give access to the sounds of speech, and facilitate speech production and interaction. To what extent do profoundly deaf cochlear implants recipients access and share the means (such as puns and riddles) and topics (e.g. absurd situations) of hearing people? Is delayed linguistic input an obstacle for them to understand and use humour? To try and answer these questions, we considered French and English data collected from 18 profoundly deaf cochlear implants recipients, aged 2 to 15, with ages at implantation varying from 1 to 7. They were filmed in interaction with an adult, playing with toys, making objects, reading books, telling stories, or engaged in a conversation. The data were transcribed following ICOR transcription norms, in which laughter is taken into account. In passages that involve laughter, and therefore humor (Charaudeau 2006), we characterized the means and topics that led the participants to laugh together. For the youngest children, the main sources of humour are the gestures they make, the objects they build, and onomatopoeia. Older children use formal speech in order to make the adult laugh, either by taking up the adult’s speech, or by speaking to / for the objects they have built. In some children and in teenagers, humour is based on shared knowledge, with references to their family and to the news.We discuss the growing ability of cochlear implants recipients to have recourse to speech-based, co-constructed humour, even though such high-level linguistic processes have been shown to be impacted in deaf children (Arfé et al. 2015), with deafness itself and limited linguistic input as possible causes (Bourdin 2015).