Investigating the degree of humorous enjoyment in reading Chinese language errors

Abstract Second language learners often make errors when they use their target language for communication. People perceive some of these errors as humorous. Many factors influence these perceptions. The purpose of this study is to investigate how these factors affect people’s perceptions when they read CSL (Chinese as a second language) learners’ humorous errors. The factors mainly refer to error stimuli and readers’ backgrounds. The researcher collected 25 error stimuli from two popular and often-cited online articles. 57 participants responded to these errors and rated them in the following three categories: Very Funny, Somewhat Funny, and Not Funny. These participants included 51 Native Speakers (NSs) of Chinese and six Non-Native Speakers (NNSs). The NSs consisted of 28 females and 23 males. Out of the participants, 17 were Chinese teachers and 40 were non-teachers. The results indicate that teachers perceived these texts as less funny than non-teachers; No significant gender difference was found; NNSs seemed to perceive these error stimuli as less funny than NSs, however, readers should be cautious in interpreting this result because of the limited number of NNSs. In addition, this study compared the humorous texts that were perceived as the funniest and the ones perceived as the least funny. The results demonstrate that an error-evoked “Very Funny” joke text had two overlapping and opposing scripts. The more overlapping and opposing the two scripts within a joke text were, the more humorous enjoyment a reader experienced. These findings improve our understanding of the interrelationship of language and humor that has been neglected in CSL, Chinese linguistics, and humor literature.