Le besoin d’humour des élèves à l’école élémentaire : quels effets sur la compréhension et l’appréciation d’une bande dessinée ?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53967/cje-rce.6643Keywords:
need for humour, humour appreciation, humour comprehension, humorous comic stripsAbstract
Does the understanding and appreciation of humorous material evolve with age according to children’s need for humor? To answer this question, we presented 222 elementary school students, aged 8–10 years on average, with humorous comic strips taken from children’s literature. Using this material, they were asked to perform two tasks: a task involving the production of inferences to measure their level of understanding of humour, and a task consisting of evaluating the humour contained in the comic strips. The children’s propensity to produce, but also to seek out, humour was measured using a tool adapted to this population of young students: the French version of the Need for Humor Scale (Picard & Blanc, 2013). Two main results can be reported: First, the need for humour seems to follow a developmental curve, at least in the age group considered, with a greater propensity to seek humour than to produce it. Secondly, and surprisingly, the need for humour does not appear to mediate the relationship between age, understanding, and appreciation of humour in children. These results deserve to be considered in order to further explore and consolidate the idea that humour could be a lever to be used in the school context for pedagogical purposes.
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