Human verbal communication is a complex phenomenon involving

dynamics that normally result in the alignment of participants

on several modalities, and across various linguistic domains.

We examined here whether such dynamics occur also for

paralinguistic events, in particular, in the case of laughter. Using

a conversational corpus containing dyadic interactions in three

languages (French, German and Mandarin Chinese), we investigated

three measures of alignment: convergence, synchrony and

agreement. Support for convergence and synchrony was found

in all three languages, although the level of support varied with

the language, while the agreement in laughter type was found

to be significant for the German data. The implications of these

findings towards a better understanding of the role of laughter

in human communication are discussed.