Four- and five-year-old’s attention to emotional prosody as a function of speaker conventionality

• In Event: Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

Consider the following utterance: “I’m working from home for another semester.” This utterance can convey markedly different meanings if spoken in a sad-sounding voice versus a happy-sounding voice (e.g., Berman, Chambers & Graham, 2010). As illustrated by this example, understanding another’s communicative intent often involves the integration of the words spoken with non-linguistic cues. The focus of the current study was on one particularly powerful cue that speakers can use to signal their intended meaning, namely emotional prosody. Emotional prosody is a paralinguistic cue that provides information about a speaker’s emotional state as expressed through variations in pitch level, pitch contours, and rate of speech (Banse & Scherer, 1996). We examined preschoolers’ pragmatic adaptation in the use of emotional prosody by examining 4- and 5-year-olds’ use of emotional prosody to resolve communicative ambiguity (i.e., statements where the meaning is unclear) as a function of speaker conventionality. Specifically, the study explored whether 4- and 5-year-olds flexibly use emotional prosody to infer intent in response to a single speaker who uses emotional prosody in conventional and unconventional ways within the same interaction.
Method. English-speaking 4-year-olds (N=37) and 5-year-olds (N=29) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: Conventional Emotional Prosody Use 1st or Unconventional Emotional Prosody Use 1st. In Conventional Emotional Prosody Use 1st, children were presented with a speaker who used emotional prosody conventionally (e.g., “My soccer team won a championship” in a happy voice), followed by a series of test trials. The same speaker then used emotional prosody unconventionally for the second block of trials (e.g., “I lost my favorite stuffed animal” in a happy voice). The opposite order was present for Unconventional Emotional Prosody Use 1st. During test trials, children were presented with 2 images that belonged to the same category but varied in terms of their likelihood to be associated with positive or negative emotional prosody (e.g., clean duck and dirty duck) and were prompted to “Look, look at X! Point to the X” in positive or negative emotional prosody.
Results. Eye-gaze data indicated children were more likely to locate the correct target when presented with negative emotional prosody (p=.03). The pointing data indicated a significant main effect of condition (p=.03). Specifically, children showed greater accuracy in locating the correct target using emotional prosody cues in Conventional Emotional Prosody Use 1st compared to Unconventional Emotional Prosody Use 1st.
Conclusions. The eye-gaze data supported the presence of a negativity bias, specifically, children were more likely to match the target item when they heard negative relative to positive emotional prosody. The pointing data indicated that children flexibly responded to initial cues related to the speaker’s conventionality, but they did not adapt their inferences when the speaker switched the conventionality of their emotional prosody use. The findings of this study are compatible with a socio-cognitive explanation regarding how children process language on-line and provide greater insight into preschooler’s pragmatic thresholds.

Authors

• Karolina Wieczorek, University of Calgary (U of C)
  Presenting Author

• Craig Chambers, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan A Graham, University of Calgary (U of C)
  Non-Presenting Author