How do children learn novel emotion words? A study of emotion concept acquisition in preschoolers

Understanding emotion words is vital to understanding, regulating, and communicating one's emotions. Yet, little work examines how emotion words are acquired by children. Previous research in linguistics suggests that children use the sentence frame in which a novel word is presented to home in on the meaning of that word, in conjunction with situational cues from the environment. No research has examined how children integrate these cues to learn the meaning of emotion adjectives (e.g., "happy," "sad," "mad"). We conducted 2 studies examining the role of sentence frame and situational context in children's (ages 3-5) understanding of the meanings of novel words denoting emotions. In Study 1 (N = 135) children viewed a conversation wherein a novel "alien" word was presented in 1 of 3 sentence frames that varied in how likely the word was to denote an emotion (i.e., is daxy, feels daxy, or feels daxy about). Children selected the image that represented the meaning of the word in a picture-pointing task. Images depicted aliens experiencing an emotion, a physical state, or performing an action. In Study 2 (N = 113) situational context was added via cartoons depicting an emotional scenario. Findings suggest that children are more likely to associate emotion images with a novel word with increasing age, more informative sentence frames, and when the situational context implies that an emotion is present. This provides important insight on how educational and clinical settings can use language and situational context to aide in emotion understanding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).