Overcoming Lexical Bias in the Judgment of Emotion in Speech: Role of Executive Function and Usefulness Understanding in Young Children

Abstract

Studies have shown that when listening to speech sounds that express different emotions through prosodic and lexical content, adults tend to judge a speaker’s emotion based on prosody, while young children tend to judge a speaker’s emotion based on lexical content. This study examined three factors that can help 3- to 5-year-old children overcome their lexical bias and use prosody to judge a speaker’s emotion. The results showed that an understanding of the usefulness of prosody to infer emotion from speech influenced young children’s tendency to focus on prosody, and that only children with well-developed executive functions could judge a speaker’s emotions by focusing on prosody—to the extent that they could read emotions from it. To achieve this, in addition to understanding, children needed to switch their attention away from lexical content and read emotions from prosody.