Output dominance as a predictor of humor content in verbal productions /
Output dominance measures are used to determine what features people tend to instantiate in a mental representation when encountering a given concept. This study makes use of output dominance measures as a way of testing incongruity-based models of the cognitive basis of humor. Incongruity was ope...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Thesis eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
[Place of publication not identified] :
[publisher not identified] ;
2000.
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Link to OAKTrust copy |
| Summary: | Output dominance measures are used to determine what features people tend to instantiate in a mental representation when encountering a given concept. This study makes use of output dominance measures as a way of testing incongruity-based models of the cognitive basis of humor. Incongruity was operationalized as the relative disparity between output dominance scores for the features of juxtaposed concept pairs. Experiment 1 found that verbal humor production can be systematically elicited in a laboratory setting by having participants uncover similarities in the juxtaposition of either related or unrelated pairs of concepts. Experiment 2 had 221 undergraduate students match the properties of the uncovered similarities to separate output-dominance-ordered feature lists generated for each of the concepts. It was hypothesized that juxtapositions judged funny would rely more often on properties with significantly different output dominance scores per concept, while those judged not funny would involve fewer instances of divergent output dominance scores. The hypothesis was generally supported. It would appear that cognitive constructs of conceptual structure and output dominance may be useful for operationalizing and testing incongruity theories of verbal humor processing. Implications of the changing salience of properties in the joke context (as opposed to default salience determined by output dominance scores) are discussed in terms of cognitive comparison models based on schema-structured mental representations. |
|---|---|
| Item Description: | "Major subject: Psychology". Vita. |
| Physical Description: | vi, 46 leaves ; 28 cm. Also available online. Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (leaves 42-43). |