The present research aimed to compare humor comprehension in primary-school-aged
healthy children and children suffering from epilepsy, and to examine whether the
peculiarities in humor perception of preschool children with epilepsy that were found
in Suits’s (2007) research (e.g. dichotomous response style and the tendency to regard
aggressive and verbal jokes as less funny), remain unchanged as the child grows older.
Participants were 131 Estonian children aged 7–10 (M = 8,40, SD = 0,93), of whom
100 made up the control and 31 the test group. A previously developed test (Suits, 2004)
for evaluating preschool children’s humor comprehension was used. Results show that
children with epilepsy assessed jokes as funnier and used different explanations than
healthy children (especially in verbal humor), indicating a possibility that children with
epilepsy reached the same developmental stage in humor perception in primary school
that healthy children reached already before starting to attend school.
Keywords: verbal and visual humor, epilepsy, primary-school-aged childrenhttp://tartu.ester.ee/record=b2596697~S1*es
