Timing of laughter in conversation: better late than never?

Studies in Conversation Analysis show that timing is a cue for preference organisation of pragmatic meanings. Responses that occur outside of an expected temporal window tend to be associated with dispreferred options and/or negatively charged meanings. The present perception study applied the predictions of conversation analysis to laughed (as opposed to spoken) responses, hypothesising that timing of genuine laughter obeys similar time constraints. We investigated perceptions of voiced and unvoiced laughs occurring at three time points and in three discourse contexts. The results show that delayed laughs were rated as significantly less genuine and more sarcastic than laughs that occurred within the expected time window or earlier. The timing effect was moderated by laughter type and discourse context. The results confirm that timing of a response contributes to conversational meanings, though the effect is not as general as previously suggested.