Verarbeitung von konkreten und abstrakten Wörtern bei Kindern im Schulalter

Kauschke, Christina; Nutsch, Cornelia; Schrauf, Judith

doi:10.1026/0049-8637/a000045

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…In line with previous word processing studies with children (e.g., Silk et al, 2009 ; Kauschke et al, 2012 ), we expect an age-dependent improvement of word processing skills, reflected in higher accuracy and lower reaction times with increasing age in both tasks. Beyond this expectable age-related improvement we aim at investigating whether developmental changes occur in a linear or in a graded, stepwise manner during childhood.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Age-Dependent Positivity-Bias in Children’s Processing of Emotion Terms

et al. 2017

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Emotions play an important role in human communication, and the daily-life interactions of young children often include situations that require the verbalization of emotional states with verbal means, e.g., with emotion terms. Through them, one can express own emotional states and those of others. Thus, the acquisition of emotion terms allows children to participate more intensively in social contexts – a basic requirement for learning new words and for elaborating socio-emotional skills. However, little is known about how children acquire and process this specific word category, which is positioned between concrete and abstract words. In particular, the influence of valence on emotion word processing during childhood has not been sufficiently investigated. Previous research points to an advantage of positive words over negative and neutral words in word processing. While previous studies found valence effects to be influenced by factors such as arousal, frequency, concreteness, and task, it is still unclear if and how valence effects are also modified by age. The present study compares the performance of children aged from 5 to 12 years and adults in two experimental tasks: lexical decision (word or pseudoword) and emotional categorization (positive or negative). Stimuli consisted of 48 German emotion terms (24 positive and 24 negative) matched for arousal, concreteness, age of acquisition, word class, word length, morphological complexity, frequency, and neighborhood density. Results from both tasks reveal two developmental trends: First, with increasing age children responded faster and more correctly, suggesting that emotion vocabulary gradually becomes more stable and differentiated during middle childhood. Second, the influence of valence varied with age: younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) showed significantly higher performance levels for positive emotion terms compared to negative emotion terms, whereas older children and adults did not. This age-related valence effect in emotion word processing will be discussed with respect to linguistic and methodological aspects.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Age-Dependent Positivity-Bias in Children’s Processing of Emotion Terms

et al. 2017

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“…Although Russell and Ridgeway (1983, p. 802) showed that “children seem to organize emotion terms in much the same way as do adults” across the dimensions of valence and arousal, Widen and Russell (2008) concluded that emotion categories develop gradually, having investigated the comprehension, categorization, and production of emotion terms in preschoolers. Kauschke et al (2012) showed improvements in the processing of abstract terms (including emotion words) using a lexical decision task with children between 8 and 12 years of age. Baron-Cohen et al (2010) reported substantial changes in the size of the receptive emotion vocabulary between 4 and 11 years of age.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Emotional Valence for the Processing of Facial and Verbal Stimuli—Positivity or Negativity Bias?

et al. 2019

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Emotional valence is predominately conveyed in social interactions by words and facial expressions. The existence of broad biases which favor more efficient processing of positive or negative emotions is still a controversial matter. While so far this question has been investigated separately for each modality, in this narrative review of the literature we focus on valence effects in processing both words and facial expressions. In order to identify the factors underlying positivity and negativity effects, and to uncover whether these effects depend on modality and age, we present and analyze three representative overviews of the literature concerning valence effects in word processing, face processing, and combinations of word and face processing. Our analysis of word processing studies points to a positivity bias or a balanced processing of positive and negative words, whereas the analysis of face processing studies showed the existence of separate positivity and negativity biases depending on the experimental paradigm. The mixed results seem to be a product of the different methods and types of stimuli being used. Interestingly, we found that children exhibit a clear positivity advantage for both word and face processing, indicating similar processing biases in both modalities. Over the course of development, the initial positivity advantage gradually disappears, and in some face processing studies even reverses into a negativity bias. We therefore conclude that there is a need for future research that systematically analyses the impact of age and modality on the emergence of these valence effects. Finally, we discuss possible explanations for the presence of the early positivity advantage and its subsequent decrease.

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