Laughter in Dialogues with Normal-Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Children: Do they all laugh alike?

Overview & Synopsis

Despite the technological advancements, children with prostheses or cochlear implants, even when early implanted, show heterogeneous language skills and often struggle with pragmatic communication aspects. In our study, we focus on exploring laughter use and responsiveness to others' laughter in dialogue, comparing Normal-Hearing (N=13) and Hearing-Impaired (N=9) children while engaged in a series of conversational tasks with an adult experimenter. We observe significant differences between groups in the amount of conversational tasks complete in the allocated time and in terms of laughter frequency, speech-laughter and laughter mimicry occurrences. We discuss the observations on children and adult behaviour in relation to previous literature in adult-adult and child-caregiver interaction. Our results support the hypothesis that laughter use and responsiveness in dialogue might be related to pragmatic competences and informative about conversational quality.