# name
U-shaped behavior in multilingual children’s written production of jokes

# metadata.dc.description[].value
Màster de Lingüística Aplicada i Adquisició de Llengües en Contextos Multilingües, Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2012, Supervisor: Dr. Marta Fernández-Villanueva

# metadata.dc.description.abstract[].value
The joke is a genre of oral literature acquired during childhood and adolescence. 
Together with other figurative uses of language it is bound to cognitive 
developments. The goal of this study is analyzing some developmental aspects of 
the written production of jokes and finding suitable coding categories for the 
analysis. A sample of 234 multilingual children and adolescents from 6
to 16 years of age were selected from the CesCa corpus (Catalan Written in 
Schools of Catalonia). They had been asked to write a joke or a funny situation. 
The categories proved quite suitable to code types of responses in terms of 
speech acts, types of texts, types of jokes, production errors and multilingualism in use. The results showed an increasing development by age groups and some u-shaped behaviors by age. We interpret u-shape behavior as a point of cognitive restructuring according to the Representational Redescription 
Model (RRM). Regarding multilingualism, jokes showed more code-switching than 
other humorous texts, but an increase of Catalan use and a descent in 
code-switching. The study of joke production in developmental perspective has 
proven to be a promising domain of inquiry deserving further exploration.

# metadata.dc.source[].value
Màster Oficial - Lingüística Aplicada i Adquisició de Llengües en Contextos Multilingües

# metadata.dc.title[].value
U-shaped behavior in multilingual children’s written production of jokes