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Related Experiment Videos

Sensitivity to emotion information in children's lexical processing.

Tatiana C Lund1, David M Sidhu1, Penny M Pexman1

  • 1University of Calgary, Canada.

Cognition
|April 27, 2019
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Children as young as 6 years old show sensitivity to word valence, impacting their vocabulary acquisition and lexical processing. This study reveals emotional words influence word recognition earlier than previously thought.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive psychology
  • Developmental psychology
  • Linguistics

Background:

  • Conceptual processing theories suggest emotion information aids vocabulary acquisition.
  • Previous research has not established the age at which word valence influences lexical processing.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the influence of word valence (positive, neutral, negative) on children's lexical processing.
  • To test predictions of multiple representation accounts of conceptual processing.

Main Methods:

  • An auditory lexical decision task (ALDT) was used with 40 positive, 40 neutral, and 40 negative words, plus 120 nonwords.
  • 99 children aged 5, 6, and 7 years participated in the study.

Main Results:

Keywords:
Affective embodimentAuditory lexical decisionConcretenessEmotionLexical processingWord valence

Related Experiment Videos

  • Five-year-olds showed no significant effect of valence on ALDT responses.
  • Six-year-olds responded faster to negative words than neutral words, and to positive abstract words versus neutral abstract words.
  • Seven-year-olds responded faster to positive words than neutral words, irrespective of concreteness.

    • Conclusions:

    • Children demonstrate sensitivity to word valence in lexical processing at an earlier age than previously documented.
    • Children's language skills correlate with enhanced processing of abstract neutral words between ages 6 and 7.
    • Findings support multimodal accounts of word meaning and lexical development.