"Laughter" NY Times - Natalie Angier

Dr. Robert P. Provine, has studied laughter as a vocalization form, and thus as a part of language. In fact, he points out as linguists struggle to find a commonality over languages of the world, laughter is, in fact a univesrsal vocalization, and thus of extreme importance to linguists and cognitive scientists.

Dr. Provine studied waveforms generated by laughing and found a common thread across different laughs made by different people of differentlanguages and sexes. He found that the key to the laugh is the regular rhythm of vowel burst sounds that are produced. He also found a decrescendo structure to laughs. This becomes important when the laugh is played backwards. Upon being played in reverse, a laugh definitely sounds odd, but "it is still clearly recognizable as a laugh, just as a birdsong would be; the same cannot be said for a human conversation played backwards."

Laughter was also found to follow rules. These rules are followed, during conversation, by both the speaker and the listener(s). Laughs generally appear as puntuations and never intrude into the middle of a phrase's structure. Dr. Provine also points out that this interruption is often a classic sign of a psychological abnormality.

From his studies, Dr. Provine hypothesizes that laughter and speech are actually "mutually eclusive but interacting vocal processes" and that the speech domain is dominant over the laughter domain.

Think of the issues raised by this example. How does laughter as a kind of vocalization differ from language as a kind of vocalization? Note that laughter is intelligible backwards, unlike speech. So directionality must be part of the representations constituting language.

Is laughter even represented? That is, does your mind/brain have knowledge of laughter in the same way it has knowledge of faces?