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Take Your Word or Tone for It? European American and Chinese Children's Attention to Emotional Cues in Speech
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Yang, Yang; Wang, Li; Wang, Qi – Child Development, 2021
Cultural experiences can influence how people attend to different emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly describes feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This cross-cultural study examined children's attention to emotional cues in spoken words. The sample consisted of 121 European American (EA) and 120…
Descriptors: Children, Child Development, Whites, Asians
Spatial Metaphor Facilitates Word Learning
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Starr, Ariel; Cirolia, Alagia J.; Tillman, Katharine A.; Srinivasan, Mahesh – Child Development, 2021
Why are spatial metaphors, like the use of "high" to describe a musical pitch, so common? This study tested one hundred and fifty-four 3- to 5-year-old English-learning children on their ability to learn a novel adjective in the domain of space or pitch and to extend this adjective to the untrained dimension. Children were more…
Descriptors: Figurative Language, Language Acquisition, Vocabulary Development, Music
Flexibility in Bilingual Infants' Word Learning
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Graf Estes, Katharine; Hay, Jessica F. – Child Development, 2015
The present experiments tested bilingual infants' developmental narrowing for the interpretation of sounds that form words. These studies addressed how language specialization proceeds when the environment provides varied and divergent input. Experiment 1 (N = 32) demonstrated that bilingual 14- and 19-month-olds learned a pair of object labels…
Descriptors: Bilingualism, Infants, Language Usage, Environmental Influences
When You're Happy and I Know It: Four-Year-Olds' Emotional Perspective Taking during Online Language Comprehension
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Khu, Melanie; Chambers, Craig; Graham, Susan A. – Child Development, 2018
Using a novel emotional perspective-taking task, this study investigated 4-year-olds' (n = 97) use of a speaker's emotional prosody to make inferences about the speaker's emotional state and, correspondingly, their communicative intent. Eye gaze measures indicated preschoolers used emotional perspective inferences to guide their real-time…
Descriptors: Perspective Taking, Child Development, Intonation, Suprasegmentals
From Flexibility to Constraint: The Contrastive Use of Lexical Tone in Early Word Learning
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Hay, Jessica F.; Graf Estes, Katharine; Wang, Tianlin; Saffran, Jenny R. – Child Development, 2015
Infants must develop both flexibility and constraint in their interpretation of acceptable word forms. The current experiments examined the development of infants' lexical interpretation of non-native variations in pitch contour. Fourteen-, 17-, and 19-month-olds (Experiments 1 and 2, N = 72) heard labels for two novel objects; labels…
Descriptors: Infants, Intonation, Auditory Perception, Suprasegmentals
Regression and Reorganization of Intonation between 6 and 23 Months
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Snow, David – Child Development, 2006
The purpose of this study was to describe the pattern in which English-speaking children acquire intonation. A second goal was to account for emerging intonation from a theoretical perspective. Six groups of 10 children each between the ages of 6 and 23 months participated in individual play sessions with their mothers and an experimenter. Pitch…
Descriptors: Intonation, Language Acquisition, Play, Mothers