Humour Comprehension of Chinese Adolescents with and without Dyslexia

ABSTRACT

This study aims to bridge the research gap in the humour comprehension problems of individuals with dyslexia in Chinese culture. We conducted a nonexperimental study to examine the differences between Chinese adolescents with and without dyslexia in visual humour comprehension as well as the group differences in the correlation of visual humour comprehension with other abilities. In total, 48 Chinese adolescents (16 individuals with dyslexia and 32 individuals without dyslexia) were recruited in Hong Kong. They were all administered several tasks: tests of nonverbal IQ, Chinese character reading, visual-spatial attention, orthographic knowledge, and visual humour comprehension. Our results indicated that visual humour comprehension is correlated with other abilities. Additionally, the group with dyslexia performed significantly less accurately on most tasks except humour comprehension accuracy. However, only visual spatial attention, orthographic knowledge, and humour comprehension speed significantly predicted membership in the two groups. Finally, approximately half of the participants with dyslexia had significantly slower humour comprehension than those with typical development. Our findings shed light on problems with humour comprehension exhibited by Chinese individuals with dyslexia.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese adolescent
• dyslexia
• humour comprehension accuracy
• humour comprehension accuracy speed

Acknowledgments

The work described in this article was partially supported by the Research Support Scheme 2017/2018 of the Department of Special Education and Counselling at the Education University of Hong Kong.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Support Scheme 2017/2018 of the Department of Special Education and Counselling at the Education University of Hong Kong.