The development of Mandarin-learning preschoolers' use of prosody and semantic cues in verbal emotion identification

Prosody and semantic content are important cues in emotion perception, though they are not always congruent, as in irony, humor, and insincerity. Adults typically rely on prosody to interpret emotions when cues conflict, while children gradually shift their reliance from semantics to prosody with age, acquiring adult-like cue-weighting strategies during the school years. However, it was unclear whether children learning tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese show a similar developmental trajectory, as their intensive experience with linguistically meaningful pitch variations (lexical tones) may heighten sensitivity to emotional prosody and potentially accelerate development. We recruited 104 Mandarin-learning 3- to 6-year olds and 27 adult controls. Stimuli included semantically positive or negative utterances produced with happy or sad prosody, creating prosody-semantics incongruent expressions (e.g., semantically positive utterances with sad prosody, and vice versa). Participants judged the speaker's emotion (happy or sad), and the proportion of prosody-based responses was analyzed. Results showed that 3- and 4-year olds displayed no clear preference for either cue, with prosody-based responses near chance level (50%). Five-year olds began to show prosodic preference (though only for positive utterances with sad prosody), while 6-year olds demonstrated robust prosodic preference for both utterance types, reaching adult-like levels. These findings indicate that Mandarin-learning children develop prosodic preference during preschool years, with emerging preference by age 5 and adult-like strength by age 6. The results suggest that cue-weighting strategies in emotion perception may follow a universal developmental trajectory from semantic-dominance to prosody-dominance, with detailed developmental courses modulated by language-specific experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).