Age-Dependent Changes of Thinking about Verbs.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience

Background:

• Understanding how children and adolescents process emotional and motor verbs is crucial for developmental psycholinguistics.
• Previous research has not fully elucidated the developmental trajectory of verb conceptualization, particularly concerning emotion and motor attributes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the developmental changes in the knowledge and representation of emotional and motor verbs across three age groups: 8-11, 12-15, and 16-19 years.
• To examine how factors like age of acquisition, valence, arousal, imageability, and relatedness influence verb processing during development.

Main Methods:

• Participants (children and adolescents) estimated verb familiarity, age of acquisition, valence, arousal, imageability, and motor- and emotion-relatedness.
• Statistical analyses were employed to compare estimations across age groups and genders, and to explore correlations between different verb attributes.

Main Results:

• The attribution of emotional character to verbs developed gradually, becoming more stable after age 12-15, with males showing lower emotion-relatedness ratings than females in the youngest group.
• Age of acquisition (AoA) increased with age, positively correlating with emotion-relatedness, indicating later learning for these verbs. Imageability decreased with age and predicted arousal, AoA, and relatedness.
• Affective valence judgments shifted towards less positive (less "happy") with age, while arousal increased with motor-relatedness and decreased with emotion-relatedness.

Conclusions:

• Verb conceptualization, particularly the understanding of emotion-related aspects, undergoes significant development during childhood and adolescence.
• Imageability emerges as a key factor influencing the processing of verbs, affecting their perceived arousal, age of acquisition, and relatedness.
• These findings offer insights into the evolving representations of emotional and motor verbs, highlighting the interplay between linguistic, cognitive, and affective development.