Patterns of emotional expression during the formation of egocentric awareness in early childhood: a case study
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Updated: May 12, 2026

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
Published on: April 28, 2016
Lin Guo1, Zhenyao Quan2, Chengyu Nan2
1School of Finance, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China.
Abstract:
Emotional expression is a fundamental dimension of children's social development and is closely linked to psychological processes, language competence, and self-awareness. Drawing on developmental psychology and cognitive linguistics, this study traces how a two-year-old Mandarin-speaking child develops self-recognition and egocentric awareness. Through naturalistic observation and discourse analysis, this study delineates the developmental stages of emotional expression, examines the dynamic interplay between self-awareness and language awareness across stages, and further explores how affective dialogue fosters the differentiated development of egocentric awareness. The findings indicate that egocentric awareness unfolds along a developmental continuum from affective monologue to affective dialogue. In the monologue stage, self-recognition and language awareness emerge concurrently; in the dialogue stage, egocentric awareness co-develops with language-mediated embodied thinking and an increasing demand for interpersonal feedback. Bidirectional affective expression at this stage appears to promote the development of children's general cognitive abilities. Grounded in authentic linguistic and behavioral data, this study offers a preliminary exploration of emotional expression patterns during children's mental maturation and provides tentative insights for constructing an "emotion-language" co-development model.
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