Toward integrating research on parent–child emotion talk and linguistic theory: A spotlight on parents’ (in)direct communication

Abstract

Parent-child discussions about emotion are a key socialization influence on children's socioemotional development. Extant research on parent-child discussions about emotion largely focuses on three main types of discourse content: parental elaboration, parental use of emotion labels and explanations, and parental emotion coaching. A new direction involves distinguishing between parents' direct and indirect communication of discourse content. This distinction may be vital when considering the role of children's communicative competence in their developing socio-emotional competence. We integrate literature on (in)direct communication, a concept prominent in linguistics, and emotion socialization. We argue that parental indirect communication can teach children communicative competence in the context of emotion talk. We discuss literature from the developmental and linguistic fields on parents' teaching of communicative skills, as well as potential cognitive, relational, and emotional functions of indirectness, with communication and its socialization embedded within cultural context. Finally, we suggest new research directions examining the role of parental indirect communication in children's socio-emotional development. By integrating developmental and linguistic literatures, we provide a novel approach to the study of parental emotion socialization through parent-child discourse.

From Neurodidactics to Language Teaching and Learning: The Emotional Approach

“…Thanks to advances in neuroscience, we can better understand how the brain processes learning and language acquisition. The interrelation of concepts from diverse disciplines is fundamental to understanding these problems according to developmental science (Gauvain, 2018;Hernandez et al, 2021) and intersectionality (Collins & Bilge, 2016;Midby et al, 2020). For this reason, we present a new interdisciplinary theoretical approach to second language teaching and learning based on the postulates of Neurodidactics and Linguistics.…”