Caregiver speech predicts the emergence of children's emotion vocabulary

Abstract

Learning about emotions is an important part of children's social and communicative development. How does children's emotion-related vocabulary emerge over development? How may emotion-related information in caregiver input support learning of emotion labels and other emotion-related words? This investigation examined language production and input among English-speaking toddlers (16-30 months) using two datasets: Wordbank (N = 5520; 36% female, 38% male, and 26% unknown gender; 1% Asian, 4% Black, 2% Hispanic, 40% White, 2% others, and 50% unknown ethnicity; collected in North America; dates of data collection unknown) and Child Language Data Exchange System (N = 587; 46% female, 44% male, 9% unknown gender, all unknown ethnicity; collected in North America and the UK; data collection dates, were available between 1962 and 2009). First, we show that toddlers develop the vocabulary to express increasingly wide ranges of emotional information during the first 2 years of life. Computational measures of word valence showed that emotion labels are embedded in a rich network of words with related valence. Second, we show that caregivers leverage these semantic connections in ways that may scaffold children's learning of emotion and mental state labels. This research suggests that young children use the dynamics of language input to construct emotion word meanings, and provides new techniques for defining the quality of infant-directed speech.

Less Is More: How the Language of Fiction Fosters Emotion Recognition

“…The idea that lower exposure to emotion words might be beneficial to the development of emotion recognition may appear counter-intuitive, particularly with regard to early developmental stages when children are in the process of acquiring the emotion lexicon and are learning to associate emotion words to their own sensations and those that are described to them or that they witness in others (Nencheva et al, 2023). Yet, the most direct evidence in support of the less-is-more hypothesis comes from a fascinating experiment by Peskin and Astington (2004), conducted with 5-year-old children.…”

Models of human learning should capture the complexity of natural communication

“…For instance, infants prefer emotionally-charged vs. neutral speech (Kitamura & Burnham, 1998;Panneton et al, 2006;Singh et al, 2002), actions (Zieber et al, 2014) and faces (LaBarbera et al, 1976;Reider et al, 2022). Second, emotions provide useful context that can help children construct complex meanings (Nencheva et al, 2023;Wu et al, 2021). Although we still have a very limited understanding of how affective displays interact with other communicative cues, there is some evidence that vocal emotion may benefit aspects of children's language development, such as recognizing words embedded in a speech stream (Singh, 2008).…”

<strong>Developmental Changes and Sex Differences in Infants' Neural Sensitivity to Emotional Prosodies in Spoken Words</strong>

“…Future studies can incorporate speech stimuli from male speakers to create an even more natural listening context and thoroughly investigate the impact of biological sex on infants' early processing of emotional voices. Additionally, further exploration is needed to understand how infants' neural sensitivity to prosodic emotion processing contributes to their subsequent emotional development, extraction of affective meaning, vocabulary acquisition, and other aspects of socio-linguistic development (Lindquist & Gendron, 2013;Morton & Trehub, 2003;Nencheva et al, 2023;Quam & Swingley, 2012).…”