EMOTION WORD DEVELOPMENT OF CHINESE - HERITAGE CHILDREN IN THE US - A CASE STUDY OF LUNA AND AVIA

Abstract

Emotion word competency is a key component of emotional intelligence, specifically, the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions, to differentiate between different emotions, and to use emotional information to guide one’s behavior and thinking. However, the majority of research on emotion words has been conducted with monolingual participants. While emotion word development of monolinguals is well documented, research to date shows no clear-cut answers to the question whether bilinguals, especially, heritage-bilingual children, share the same characteristics on emotion word development with monolinguals. By observing two Chinese inherited language children living in the United States in CLAN corpus, this paper will explore the output of Chinese affective words of bilingual children, in an attempt to compare and explain the similarities and differences between bilingual children and monolingual children in their vocabulary output during the period of two-word stage and the Telegraphic Speech.