Im from Africa and anytime a baby laughs, its extremely similar to how other babies around me laugh. I also found out that other babies around the world seem to laugh in a very similar manner. However, when they all grow older, they begin to develop other laughing mannerisms (some even snort)
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Laughter is not an entirely automatic process, the way that, say, sneezing is. It involves active conscious thought similar to the use of language (Provine RR, Emmorey K. 2006).
In fact, if you take a group of Americans and a group of isolated Namibians (with little contact with Western culture), the two groups will have a hard time understanding the specific meaning of each other’s laughter, while they have a relatively easy time telling things like disgust or sadness. (Sauter DA, Eisner F, Ekman P, Scott SK. Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 Feb 9)
So laughter, like speech, is something which develops a cultural inflection. An accent, of sorts!
Edit: in case it’s not clear, the laughter in babies is a different *type* of laughter, a more-automatic one similar to the laughter that adults show when tickled. This is why it is similar in most babies, while adult laughter in response to humor can sound very different from person to person.
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