Children's Understanding of Emotion in Speech

Morton, J. Bruce; Trehub, Sandra E.

doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00318

Cited by 207 publications

(274 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…These data are consistent with reports of extensive variability in social referencing in the second year of life (Blackford & Walden 1998, Walden 1991, and parallel a similar transition in expression around the time of first words (Bloom 1993, Bloom et al 1988. Finally, these data complement research with 4-to 7-year-olds in whom a tendency toward greater weighting of linguistic, relative to paralinguistic, meaning has been reported (Friend 2000, Friend & Bryant 2000, Morton & Trehub 2001 and suggest that this bias emerges out of the process of language acquisition. …”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

The transition from affective to linguistic meaning

Friend

2001

First Language

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This paper reports a transition from affective to linguistic meaning in 15-month-old infants. Behaviour regulation in the context of a social referencing procedure is used as a measure of the meaning of stimulus messages for infants. Of particular interest is the extent to which receptive vocabulary predicts behaviour regulation by language and paralanguage. Approving and disapproving lexical content was completely crossed with approving and disapproving facial and vocal paralanguage to produce stimulus messages. At the group level, the behaviour of 15-montholds was better regulated by paralanguage than by lexical content. However, receptive vocabulary was a significant predictor of the relative primacy of language and paralanguage: infants who understood the lexical content of stimulus messages were better regulated by lexical content than by paralanguage. These data suggest a transition from affective to linguistic meaning in comprehension that parallels the transition from affective expression to expression that integrates affect and language.The infant's earliest communicative experiences have been described as 'primordial sharing encounters' which progress toward ever greater differentiation between the infant and the external world (Werner & Kaplan 1963. This process of differentiation makes it possible for the infant to comprehend the referential function of language. With the comprehension of reference comes the acquisition of a receptive vocabulary and this acquisition represents a watershed in the bases of meaning. This paper explores a transition from affective to linguistic meaning in the second year of life.This transition is conceived of as parallel to a transition in productive communication from expression that is predominantly affective to expression that integrates affect and language (Bloom 1993, Bloom Beckwith & Capatides 1988. Children reach this transition in expression concomitantly with a rapid increase in productive vocabulary. The analyses of Bloom et al. (1988) and Bloom (1993) reveal the difficulty with which children first coordinate expression in the affective and linguistic modes simultaneously: when children begin producing their first words, affect expression falls below baseline just prior to articulation. Also, for children identified as late word learners, there is a decrement in the overall frequency of affect expression during the period from about 17 to 21 months as they undergo a rapid increase in vocabulary production. Bloom's (1993) interpretation is that, for reasons of processing limitations, there is a period of transition in the co-ordination of these * A portion of this research was presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies, 1998. Franco (1997) describes the development of meaning in infancy as progressing from sensorial to affective (in the newborn), from affective to pragmatic (in the 3-to 4-month-old), and from pragmatic to referential (late in the first year). HHS Public AccessImportantly, prelinguistic meanings are often conveyed par...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

The transition from affective to linguistic meaning

Friend

2001

First Language

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“…Previous studies have shown that the ability to answer questions that demand complex contextual processing, such as understanding implicit meanings, develops with age (Loukusa et al, 2007;Loukusa, Ryder, & Leinonen, 2008;. At around eight years of age children begin to pay greater attention to all of the available relevant cues, including paralinguistic aspects of communication, and they no longer focus substantially on propositional content (Bosco, Angeleri, Colle, Sacco, & Bara, 2013;Morton & Trehub, 2001). An earlier study by Loukusa et al (2007) showed that at the age of seven children can connect different kinds of contextual information in order to infer the implicit meaning of an utterance.…”

Section: Development Of Social-pragmatic Comprehensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Contextual and Social Meaning in Typically Developing Finnish-Speaking Four- To Eight-Year-Old Children

Loukusa

Mäkinen

Gabbatore

et al. 2017

Psychology of Language and Communication

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This study examined the development of social-pragmatic comprehension in 170 Finnish four-to eight-year-old children. The children were asked to respond to socially and contextually demanding questions targeting their social-pragmatic language processing, and to explain their correct answers in order to elicit their awareness of how they had derived the answers from the context. The results showed that the number of correct answers increased especially between the ages of four and seven years. We found that questions demanding contextual processing without mind-reading were the easiest to understand, followed by questions demanding processing of feelings of others and false beliefs. The questions demanding understanding of relevant language use and processing of contextual factors including mental states and intentions were the most challenging for the children. Between four and five years of age there was a remarkable developmental phase in children's ability to give proper explanations.

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“…Burnham et al, 2002;Uther et al, 2007) into IDS, and other investigations into children's vocal emotional understanding (e.g. Morton & Trehub, 2001), have utilized different filters.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%