A closer look at laughter in academic talk: A reader response

•Laughter in the BASE lecture subcorpus is twice as frequent as reported in Nesi (2012).•The frequencies of laughter in BASE and MICASE lectures are nearly identical.•Monologic lectures in the ELFA corpus contain less laughter than in the ENL corpora.•ELF users laugh much more frequently in the ELFA corpus discussion files.

In this reader response, the quantitative findings from Nesi (2012) on laughter in academic talk are reproduced and reconsidered. An anomalous word count cited for the BASE lecture subcorpus is corrected and the normalized frequency of laughter in these lectures is shown to be twice than what is reported. When the per-minute frequency of laughter is also corrected, the frequencies of laughter in BASE and MICASE lectures appear to be nearly identical, contrary to Nesi's (2012) claims. Additionally, her suggestion that laughter may be less frequent in English-medium lectures outside of L1 English settings is examined in light of data from the ELFA corpus of academic speech events recorded in Finland. While the monologic lectures in ELFA show a lower frequency of laughter than the monologic lectures in BASE and MICASE, a strong preference for laughter episodes is found in the dialogic ELFA lecture discussions. The high frequency of laughter in ELFA discussions is especially evident in the seminar files, where laughter frequencies eclipse those found from seminars in the native-speaker corpora.