Humor y demencia: una aproximación al estudio del humor en el deterioro cognitivo

Recent psycholinguistic experiments have highlighted that language impairment in dementia affects pragmatics and, notably, humor. Impairment in humor consists in the difficulty that speakers with neurodegenerative diseases develop for the proper decoding of language symbols with social and emotional background. As a result, speakers with dementia show strong difficulty in understanding humor stimuli, tend to imitate childlike humor strategies and mismatch humor production and context. In both perceptive and productive humor, people with different dementia profiles show different humor impairments: this is due, on the one hand, to both general impairment of pragmatic competence and other language levels; and, on the other hand, to the cognitive decline itself.

In this work, we offer a first approach to how speakers with different dementia syndromes that involve pragmatic impairment (Alzheimer’s disease, semantic dementia and frontotemporal dementia) retain the ability to extract inferences from humor stimuli. Likewise, building on the large gap in the study of verbal humor production, we propose a model aimed at standardizing humor production tests in the most common dementia, the Alzheimer’s disease, based on the subversion/predisposition model. This model takes the humor stimulus as a result of interaction between the subversion of recipient’s initial expectations and the contextual conditions that predispose inference extraction in humor. The primary goal of our work is to contribute to the comprehension of humor affection and impairment in different neurodegenerative diseases and, in particular, to propose a model for humor study from the perspective of clinical pragmatics.