The role of emotional valence in the acquisition of abstract concepts

• In Event: The development of emotion organization from infancy to adolescence

Abstract

Learning and using abstract words like idea or freedom are essential to success in life as most societal, cultural and scientific endeavors require grasping and manipulating abstract ideas.
Most current psychological theories (Paivio, 2007; Schwanenflugel et al., 1991; Gleitman et al., 2005; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) suggest that the ability to learn abstract concepts depends on children’s linguistic and conceptual development.

However, our recent work suggests that emotion can provide a bootstrapping mechanism for learning abstract words. First, we analysed corpus data to demonstrate that abstract words have a privileged link to emotion and reliably predict age of acquisition (AoA) norms for abstract concepts (Ponari et al., 2017). We then provided empirical evidence detailing the development of abstract concepts in typically developing children (TD) aged 6-11, assessing their knowledge of abstract and concrete words tightly matched on valence, using both an auditory lexical decision task and a definitions task. We demonstrated (Ponari et al., 2017) that TD children up to the age of 9 are sensitive to the emotional valence of abstract words, and that this facilitates processing of abstract concepts. Finally, we showed that TD children learn new abstract words (i.e. words usually learnt at a later age according to AoA norms) better if these are emotionally valenced (Ponari et al., 2020), regardless of whether the words are learnt in a linguistic context rich in other emotional words, or are learnt in a neutral context.

The above results all converge to suggest that emotional valence has a crucial role in abstract language acquisition. The hypothesis is that children can learn words that are abstract (hence lacking a concrete referent in the environment) by associating them to the feelings evoked by the situation and the facial expression of the caregiver. Thus, in general, the child’s appreciation of the emotional valence of a word would support the inference that the word refers primarily to an internal, rather than external state (Kousta et al., 2011; also see Barsalou et al., 2018).

We further assessed this hypothesis by testing abstract words’ knowledge in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, with (ALI) and without (ALN) associated language impairment. If the social/emotional skills assumed to be impaired in ASD are particularly critical to learning abstract words, we would expect disproportionate deficits in abstract knowledge, as measured by a lexical decision and a definitions task. To address the variation in language ability within the ASD group, we compared the ASD children to both TD children and children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Contrary to our hypotheses, linear mixed models, complemented by single-case analyses, showed no disproportionate disadvantage for abstract words in the ASD samples in both tasks (Figure 1). However, qualitative analyses of the definitions (correspondence analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis) revealed marked differences in defining abstract concepts: while TD and LI children use more emotional descriptions and descriptions of social interactions, both ASD groups use more examples of experiences, situations and events, as well as free associations (Figure 2).

Authors

• Marta Ponari, University of Kent
  Presenting Author

• Courtenay Norbury, University College London
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gabriella Vigliocco, University College London
  Non-Presenting Author