How do children learn novel emotion words? A study of emotion concept acquisition in preschoolers.

Abstract

Understanding emotion words is vital to understanding, regulating, and communicating one's emotions. Yet, little work examines how emotion words are acquired by children. Previous research in linguistics suggests that children use the sentence frame in which a novel word is presented to home in on the meaning of that word, in conjunction with situational cues from the environment. No research has examined how children integrate these cues to learn the meaning of emotion adjectives (e.g., "happy," "sad," "mad"). We conducted 2 studies examining the role of sentence frame and situational context in children's (ages 3-5) understanding of the meanings of novel words denoting emotions. In Study 1 (N ϭ 135) children viewed a conversation wherein a novel "alien" word was presented in 1 of 3 sentence frames that varied in how likely the word was to denote an emotion (i.e., is daxy, feels daxy, or feels daxy about). Children selected the image that represented the meaning of the word in a picture-pointing task. Images depicted aliens experiencing an emotion, a physical state, or performing an action. In Study 2 (N ϭ 113) situational context was added via cartoons depicting an emotional scenario. Findings suggest that children are more likely to associate emotion images with a novel word with increasing age, more informative sentence frames, and when the situational context implies that an emotion is present. This provides important insight on how educational and clinical settings can use language and situational context to aide in emotion understanding.

The role of emotional valence in learning novel abstract concepts.

“…Papafragou, Cassidy & Gleitman, 2007). Consistently with this hypothesis, Shablack and colleagues (2019) found that the sentence structure 'feels about' facilitates, at least marginally, 3-5 year old children's understanding of novel emotion adjectives, in the absence of other contextual information (Shablack, Becker & Lindquist, 2019).…”

“…To date, there are no studies which specifically focus on abstract words' learning, with the exception of a few which are focused on emotion words (e.g. Shablack, Becker & Lindquist, 2019). However, from the literature on word processing, a number of hypotheses that provide different answers to the question above, are available.…”

“…However, from the available data, it is unclear whether the advantage for emotionally valenced abstract words is due to the intrinsic valence of the meaning of the words or the fact that, in general, valenced words are learnt in emotional contexts (i.e., the fact that a word such as "holiday" occurs in contexts in which other positive concepts are expressed). Importantly, children's understanding of novel emotion words has been shown to be affected by the situational context (Shablack et al, 2019). Furthermore, if valence acts as a bootstrapping mechanism for the acquisition of abstract words, an emotional context could not only further boost learning of valenced abstract words, but also facilitate learning of abstract words that are intrinsically neutral.…”

Comment: A role of Language in Infant Emotion Concept Acquisition

“…Maternal discrete emotion talk and infant emotion vocabulary development), or the difficulty inherent in learning such abstract terms (Ruba, Harris, & Wilbourn (under review). Examining infants' ability to map labels to facial configurations; Shablack, Becker, & Lindquist, 2019). Therefore, it is unclear whether caregivers use emotion labels with sufficient regularity to support supervised (or semisupervised) emotion learning.…”

Examining Preverbal Infants’ Ability to Map Labels to Facial Configurations

“…More advanced word learners may (a) possess greater cognitive resources to process complex visual stimuli (i.e., human facial configurations) (Stager & Werker, 1997); (b) experience more social interactions with parents and caregivers, including greater exposure to others' emotions; and/or (c) excel at assimilating new words into their vocabularies (Widen, 2013). Since some degree of cognitive maturation, language experience, and/or emotional exposure is necessary to map labels to human facial configurations, this may partially explain why emotion labels emerge relatively late in children's vocabularies compared with other labels (e.g., "dog") (Fenson et al, 1994;Shablack et al, 2019).…”