Preschoolers' Attention to Emotional Prosody as a Function of Speaker Conventionality
Date
2020-08-24
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Emotional prosody is a paralinguistic cue that can provide information about a speaker’s emotional state. The current study examined preschoolers’ pragmatic adaptation in the use of emotional prosody. Specifically, the aims were: 1) to examine 4- and 5-year-olds’ use of emotional prosody to resolve ambiguity as a function of speaker conventionality and 2) to assess whether individual differences in cognitive and social skills contribute to this ability. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, children were presented with a speaker who used emotional prosody in both a conventional and unconventional manner within the same interaction. Following the speaker’s demonstration of conventionality, children’s use of emotional prosody in resolving ambiguity was examined using eye-gaze (i.e., implicit) and pointing (i.e., explicit) measures. Children also completed executive functioning measures (i.e., the NIH Toolbox Early Childhood Cognition Battery) and parents completed a social skills questionnaire (i.e., the Social Skills Improvement System). The findings indicated that children’s implicit processing of emotional prosody was influenced by negative emotional prosody, while children’s explicit processing of emotional prosody was influenced by the speaker’s initial conventionality. Children were flexible in response to the speaker’s initial conventionality but did not adapt their inferences when the speaker changed. This work adds to the literature supporting the use of socio-cognitive learning mechanisms and aids in clarifying the pragmatic thresholds that 4- and 5-year-olds apply in their in-the-moment reasoning about a speaker’s communicative intent.
Description
Keywords
Emotional Prosody, Speaker Conventionality, Pragmatic Adaptation, Executive Functions, Social Skills, Eye-tracking
Citation
Wieczorek, K. M. (2020). Preschoolers' Attention to Emotional Prosody as a Function of Speaker Conventionality (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.