Children’s Sensitivity to Emotional Prosody in an Unfamiliar Language: The Role of Referential Context
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2023-09-12
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Abstract
Research suggests that preschoolers use emotional prosody to make sophisticated judgements, such as using a speaker’s tone of voice (happy vs. sad) to identify an intended referent (e.g., a broken vs. intact toy). However, 4-year-olds only make these associations in familiar, but not unfamiliar languages. Here, we sought to understand these discrepant findings by investigating the role of referential cues (i.e., cues that signal the speaker’s intended object) in children’s use of emotional prosody to resolve referential ambiguity. Results indicated that 4-year-old children did not use emotional prosody to modulate their looking nor pointing to the target object. Instead, they consistently fixated to the negative object whilst pointing to the positive object. Conversely, 8-year-olds looked at and point to the target object during sad-sounding trials. Their looking and pointing to the negative object was attenuated during happy-sounding trials such that they looked and pointed equally to both objects. Taken together, findings suggest that even in the presence of heightened referential cues, use of emotional prosody in an unfamiliar language remains an emergent skill during childhood.
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Waly, Y. K. (2023). Children’s sensitivity to emotional prosody in an unfamiliar language: the role of referential context (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.