Bilingualism and children's use of paralinguistic cues to interpret emotion in speech

Abstract

Preschoolers tend to rely on what speakers say rather than how they sound when interpreting a speaker's emotion while adults rely instead on tone of voice. However, children who have a greater need to attend to speakers’ communicative requirements, such as bilingual children, may be more adept in using paralinguistic cues (e.g. tone of voice) when interpreting a speaker's affect. We explored whether bilingual children are better able than monolingual children to use paralinguistic cues when interpreting a speaker's emotion. While monolingual and bilingual children were equally capable of identifying emotion using affective information in low-pass filtered speech stimuli (Study 1), bilingual children were better able than monolingual children to use tone of voice when judging emotion in natural speech when content was clear (Study 2).