Emotion Words in Young Children’s Natural Environments

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Understanding and talking about emotions is a crucial aspect of healthy social development (Izard et al., 2001). Labeling emotion categories is clearly key for talking about emotions, but recent theory also suggests that emotion labels may be crucial for the development of emotion concepts (Barrett, 2017). Although children begin to produce emotion words by as early as 18 months of age (Ridgeway, Waters, & Kuczaj, 1985), little is known regarding what natural emotion conversation occurs between parents and their children under the age of 4. In fact, previous research has explicitly called for additional studies investigating children’s use of emotion terms in natural interactions (Bretherton, Fritz, Zahn-Waxler, & Ridgeway, 1986) and natural parent labeling of emotion when their child is present (Hoemann, Xu, & Barrett, 2019).

To address this, the present study examined 2,089 transcripts from 180 children ranging from 15- to 47-months of age from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES; MacWhinney, 2000), a publicly available data set of natural conversational interactions with children. Transcripts were selected based on several criteria: All transcripts belonged to the English-North America collection of the CHILDES database, the target child was between 15- and 47-months of age, at least one parent needed to be interacting with the target child (although transcripts were included if both parents were involved), and to ensure that the transcripts represented naturalistic conversations all transcripts in which parents were given an explicit task (e.g., reading a particular book) were removed. Transcripts were coded for the number of times emotion words were produced by mothers, fathers, and children in each transcript. Each speaker’s mean length of utterance (MLU) was also calculated as a proxy for linguistic complexity.

Results revealed that children’s production of emotion words ranged from 0 to 29 per transcript, with an average of 0.84 emotion words per transcript. Parents produced on average 2.21 emotion words per transcript, with a range from 0 to 34. Specific emotion words spoken by children and mothers are provided in Figure 1 and Figure 2, respectively. When predicting child production of emotion words, child age (z=7.61, p<.001) and parent emotion language (z=11.54, p<.001) significantly predicted child emotion language, but child MLU (z=-0.39, p=.694) and parent MLU (z=1.03, p=.305) did not. Thus, parent and child language complexity did not predict child emotion language, but parent use of emotion words, specifically, did predict child use of emotion words. Additionally, of the emotion words produced by children, 70.42% were the same emotion word that had been presented by a parent earlier in the same transcript, indicating that young children frequently, but not always, repeat an emotion word that they recently heard from a parent. Overall, results from the present study provide valuable insight into the nature of emotion language produced by young children and their parents on a day-to-day basis. This information is beneficial for understanding how children come to develop emotion concepts, and what linguistic information may be at their disposal as they are in the early stages of learning such concepts.

Authors

• Marissa Ogren, Rutgers University - Newark
  Presenting Author

• Catherine Sandhofer, University of California - Los Angeles
  Non-Presenting Author