Laughter growing up

Abstract

We present a longitudinal corpus observation of laughter use in child-mother interaction from 12 to 36 months of age from a pragmatic perspective. The main aim of our work is to investigate how laughter use in interaction may be informative about pragmatic development. We observe significant differences in child and mother use of laughter and changes over time as the child grows up, specifically in the frequency, in the pragmatic functions of laughter, and in the response to other’s laughter.