An intervention for enhancing children's understanding of jokes and riddles

Abstract

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.