Hyperawareness of puns in a second language

I was thinking recently about how the acquisition of a second language seems to (at least anecdotally) lead to a more acute ability to detect puns.

It is my belief that this phenomenon comes from the separation between words and concepts in a second language. In a native language, the concepts are so ingrained within the words themselves that there is no separation between the word and its meaning. But even in second languages acquired very early on, languages in which a person is incredibly fluent, there is a small layer of disambiguation that comes from learning the second language as essentially a set of translation words for the concepts in a native language.

Less abstractly: an infant learns the word “ball” in their native language(s) as the word for the concept of the thing that is the ball. They are introduced to the object, then the word “ball” is repeated until the child learns to recognise the word as being a set of sounds by which the idea of the ball-object is related from person to person. If that child is introduced to a second language after they have made this connection, the second language’s word for “ball” is connected to the native-language word for “ball” and not the intrinsic concept of the ball itself. This very slight disconnect leads to what I think is an imperceptible, split-second decision whenever a homophone is introduced in the second language, even far later in life, where the possibly ambiguous word is highlighted in that person’s mind and split into all of the possible concept-meanings, then the applicable concept-meaning is chosen and placed within the context.

In this way, the second-language learner reflexively considers all of the possible meanings of a given word as a step in processing that word, where for a lot of simpler concepts a truly native speaker might have such a deep word-concept tie that they would not experience that step. This naturally leads to a higher sensitivity to wordplay in a second language, particularly puns.

But I would be willing to believe that development of second language skills might increase this ability to detect puns even in a first language, if not to the same extent. I suppose it might depend on the degree to which the native speaker is aware of their second language, or the situation in which the speaker finds themselves (for example in terms of the ratio of native to non-native speakers in the conversation).

I’m interested in the extent to which the age of acquisition, length of acquisition, and number of languages (especially in different language groups/families) affect this phenomenon, as well as whether it extends to syntactical wordplay or just puns and single-word-based wordplay. If you have any thoughts on this, or any related personal experiences, please don’t hesitate to share.

Emotional contexts of language acquisition in Russian and Anglophone households

A brief thought about how the language differences between Russian and English contextualise cause and effect during a child’s first language acquisition period, especially with regard to the concepts of pain and hurting. 

Russian children grow up being told “ей/ему больно” when they hit a toy or try to pull the cat’s tail. This roughly translates to “you’re hurting him/her/it,” but not exactly. Its more literal translation is “he/she/it feels pain.” Long-form, it’s “you’re causing him/her/it to feel pain” (ты делаешь ей/ему больно). An American child would likely never hear their parent say “it feels pain” in the same context, only “he doesn’t like that” or “you’re hurting him.”

This is interesting from the standpoint of where it places the blame for the action, how it distributes cause and effect. The Russian child, purely with the language given, reads the concept of pain as intrinsic to the object or person he’s hurting. The child hit the hamster, the hamster now feels pain. To some extent, there is an abstraction with the concept of “you’ve hurt the hamster.” There is another logical step the child has to take from “I’ve hurt something” to “that something is in pain” that just doesn’t exist as a linguistic difference in normal Russian speech. The action has immediately resulted in a consequence, and that consequence is a change in someone else’s state of being. English focuses on the cause (you hurt her) and Russian on the effect (she is hurt).

This is not to say that children growing up in an Anglophone environment are less likely to internalise the ramifications of causing pain. I only mean to bring this up as an interestingly different pathway in terms of language acquisition and emotional awareness. My idiomatic French in child-raising situations is not stellar, but the same concept might be interesting to apply to the French equivalent of these phrases (tu lui fais du mal, you’re doing [something] bad to him), and to other languages. Also of interest might be different emotion-association phrases such as “I missed you” versus the Russian “я по тебе скучал/а” (I was lonely from your absence) or the French “tu me manque” (you were missing from me). Patterns in how these phrases are laid out within and across languages might be interesting to consider as perhaps being tied to the acquisition of compassion and interpersonal relationship emotions during the childhood language acquisition period.