Emotion Vocabulary Development Over the Second Year of Life: The Impact of Maternal Emotion Talk

• In Event: 3-004 - The Development of Emotion Understanding From Infancy Through Early Childhood

Integrative Statement

The ability to recognize and correctly respond to other’s emotions is critical to children’s social and emotional development (Izard et al., 2001). In particular, learning emotion labels, like “happy” and “sad,” is thought to lay the foundation for emotion recognition abilities (Barrett, 2018). While much research has found that children’s language development in general is influenced by parental discourse (Fivush et al, 2009), far less research has focused on how parental discourse influences EMOTION vocabulary development. In addition, very little research on children’s emotion vocabulary development has focused on first acquisition of emotion labels in infancy (i.e., before age 2). Furthermore, only one study (Knothe & Walle, 2018) has examined how parental discourse differs across discrete emotions, such as anger, happiness, and disgust. The current study addresses these gaps in the literature to explore (a) how maternal emotion talk relates to vocabulary development across the second year of life, and (b) how these relations might differ across discrete emotions.

The final sample included 61 mothers who narrated a wordless picture book to their 12- to 24-month-old infants (29 females, M age =18.26 months). The book included pictures of racially diverse children displaying salient happy, sad, angry, scared, and disgusted expressions. Mothers were given unlimited time and instructed to narrate the book as they would any picture book at home. Their narrations were transcribed verbatim and coded using the scheme in Table 1. The number of emotion/words and proxies used in the narration were also coded and totaled (see Table 2). Mothers reported their infants’ receptive understanding and production of non-emotional words using the MacArthur Inventory (Fenson, et al., 2000) and emotional words (e.g., “happy”) using an original inventory.

The first set of analyses explored how maternal emotion talk related to vocabulary development when controlling for age. Elaborated statements, descriptive questions, and total words used to narrate the book were significant predictors of NON-EMOTIONAL receptive and productive vocabulary (ps<.05). However, causal questions predicted a significant amount of the variance in EMOTIONAL productive vocabulary (p=.004). This suggests that children may learn emotion labels through higher-level, two-way conversations about emotions, in a manner that is different than how children learn non-emotional words (e.g., dog, ball).

The second set of analyses explored how maternal emotion talk differed across discrete emotions (e.g., anger, happiness, disgust). Interestingly, mothers tended to narrate the disgust pages differently from the other emotion pages. Disgust pages were characterized by high non-emotional elaborated statements, high non-emotional and emotional descriptive questions, low emotional unelaborated statements, and low emotion labels (Tables 1 and 2). In contrast, happy pages were characterized by high non-emotional/emotional unelaborated statements and high emotion labels. This complex way of describing disgust may explain why the label “disgust” appears relatively late in children’s vocabularies (Widen & Russell, 2013). Developmental differences in how mothers discuss emotions with their younger (12-17 months) and older (18-24 months) infants will also be discussed. Results will be discussed in terms of how parents can best facilitate their children’s understanding and use of emotion labels.

Authors

• Ashley Ruba, University of Washington
  Presenting Author

• Vrinda Kalia, Miami University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Makeba Parramore Wilbourn, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author