Reinterpretation processes and humour understanding in English-speaking young adults with dyslexia

The aim of this study is to assess whether and how lexical and syntactic ambiguity are resolved in jokes by readers with and without dyslexia. This research focuses specifically on an important phenomenon of language comprehension, i.e., the ability to access word meaning quickly and effortlessly in sentences which, in this specific work, are made more challenging by the presence of “lexical and syntactic ambiguity”. The present study addresses the ambiguity in punchlines from a semantic perspective with the aim of showing how different types of ambiguity are perceived by readers and how they reanalyse jokes by considering their ambiguous forms. This work focuses on homonymy in jokes where the humorous effect is triggered by words whose disambiguation does not involve a change of word class (i.e., “bat” has two meanings that belong to the same word class, both are nouns) and words whose disambiguation instead requires a change in word class (i.e., “seal” has two meanings that belong to two different word classes, noun and verb).