Abstract
Emotions play an important role in human communication, and the daily-life interactions of young children often include situations that require the verbalization of emotional states with verbal means, e.g., with emotion terms. Through them, one can express own emotional states and those of others. Thus, the acquisition of emotion terms allows children to participate more intensively in social contexts – a basic requirement for learning new words and for elaborating socio-emotional skills. However, little is known about how children acquire and process this specific word category, which is positioned between concrete and abstract words. In particular, the influence of valence on emotion word processing during childhood has not been sufficiently investigated. Previous research points to an advantage of positive words over negative and neutral words in word processing. While previous studies found valence effects to be influenced by factors such as arousal, frequency, concreteness, and task, it is still unclear if and how valence effects are also modified by age. The present study compares the performance of children aged from 5 to 12 years and adults in two experimental tasks: lexical decision (word or pseudoword) and emotional categorization (positive or negative). Stimuli consisted of 48 German emotion terms (24 positive and 24 negative) matched for arousal, concreteness, age of acquisition, word class, word length, morphological complexity, frequency, and neighborhood density. Results from both tasks reveal two developmental trends: First, with increasing age children responded faster and more correctly, suggesting that emotion vocabulary gradually becomes more stable and differentiated during middle childhood. Second, the influence of valence varied with age: younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) showed significantly higher performance levels for positive emotion terms compared to negative emotion terms, whereas older children and adults did not. This age-related valence effect in emotion word processing will be discussed with respect to linguistic and methodological aspects.
Highlights
The ability to verbalize emotional states is a crucial stepping stone in language acquisition, and for a child’s social-emotional development, since it enables children to participate in social contexts which form an essential learning environment
The present study demonstrated a shift in the processing of positive and negative words in the course of development: While young children showed a better performance for positive words, this preference disappeared with increasing age
The results showed that the number of words differed with respect to valence: While primary and secondary school children produced the same number of positive words, younger children produced significantly fewer negative words compared to the older children
Summary
The ability to verbalize emotional states is a crucial stepping stone in language acquisition, and for a child’s social-emotional development, since it enables children to participate in social contexts which form an essential learning environment. In their third year of life children begin to produce their first words to express emotional states (such as happiness) or emotional behavior. Children’s Processing of Emotion Terms (e.g., crying, Bretherton and Beeghly, 1982; Kristen et al, 2012). Inherent semantic features of emotion terms are (1) that they are emotional (as opposed to neutral) and (2) that they are characterized by a specific valence (positive or negative) and by a word-specific degree of arousal (low or high)
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