Abstract
Using a novel emotional perspective-taking task, this study investigated 4-year-olds' (n=97) use of a speaker's emotional prosody to make inferences about the speaker's emotional state and, correspondingly, their communicative intent. Eye gaze measures indicated preschoolers used emotional perspective inferences to guide their real-time interpretation of ambiguous statements. However, these sensitivities were less apparent in overt responses, suggesting preschoolers' ability to integrate emotional perspective cues is at an emergent state. Perspective taking during online language processing was positively correlated with receptive vocabulary and an offline measure of emotional perspective taking, but not with cognitive perspective taking, conflict or delay inhibitory control, or working memory. Together, the results underscore how children's emerging communicative competence involves different kinds of perspective inferences with distinct cognitive underpinnings.
Highlights
Using a novel emotional perspective-taking task, this study investigated 4-year-olds’ (n = 97) use of a speaker’s emotional prosody to make inferences about the speaker’s emotional state and, correspondingly, their communicative intent
We investigated preschool children’s emotional perspective taking using a novel communication task
By manipulating trial outcomes such that a desired outcome for an adult speaker meant an undesired outcome for the child and vice versa, we created a situation where the expected emotional reaction was the opposite for the adult and child
Summary
The pretrial image for each sequence contained either a single object (on critical trials) or an identical pair of objects (on filler trials) paired with a recorded statement introducing the object(s) (e.g., “The sticker is a fish sticker” or, on potential loss trials, “ is the bad X”) These statements were recorded using child-directed speech with neutral emotional prosody. The trial image was first presented for 1,000 ms in silence, after which the child heard a referentially ambiguous utterance (“Look, there it is” or “Oh, I see it.”), spoken with either positive (happy-sounding) or negative (sad-sounding) emotional prosody. They were prerecorded, the utterances appeared to be spontaneously produced by the (confederate) adult player located in another room (see Procedure). An HD camera, positioned behind the participant, recorded pointing behavior
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