An intervention was conducted for teaching children a strategy for
understanding and explaining the humour in lexical jokes. Two typical
7-year-olds and two students with learning disabilities, ages 9 and 11,
participated in the training. A multiple probe design across joke sets and
across children was used. Results showed that all children mastered the
strategy and learned to explain lexical jokes. Limited generalization of
this strategy to untrained jokes occurred; however, generalization
increased significantly after children gained more knowledge of multiple
word meanings through follow-up semantic training. Clinical implica
tions are discussed.
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