Summary Learning about emotions is an important part of children’s social and communicative development. How does children’s emotion-related vocabulary emerge throughout development? How can emotion-related information in the caregiver’s input support the learning of emotion labels and other emotion-related words? This research examined language production and input among young English-speaking children (16–30 months) using two data sets: Wordbank (N = 5520; 36% female, 38% male, and 26% gender unknown; 1% Asian, 4% Black, 2% Hispanic, 40% White, 2% Other, and 50% Unknown Ethnicity; collected in North America; dates of data collection unknown) and Child Language Data Exchange System (N = 587; 46 % female, 44% male, 9% gender unknown, all ethnicity unknown; collected in North America and the United Kingdom; data collection dates were available between 1962 and 2009). First, we show that young children develop the vocabulary to express increasingly broader ranges of emotional information during the first 2 years of life. Computational measures of word valence showed that emotion labels are embedded in a rich network of words with related valence. Second, we show that caregivers leverage these semantic connections in ways that can scaffold children’s learning about labels for emotions and mental states. This research suggests that toddlers use the dynamics of language input to construct emotional word meanings and provides new techniques for defining the quality of infant-directed speech. |
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Learning about emotions is an important part of children’s social and communicative development. If children can use words like "happy" or "sad" to talk about emotions, it predicts how well they will get along with their peers, calm down after a negative event, and thrive in school. A study published in Child Development by researchers at Princeton University in New Jersey, United States, examined language production and input among young English-speaking children to assess whether emotion labels (such as "happy," which they directly name an internal emotional state) could help children learn its meaning. The team explored the emergence of valenced words (i.e., positive and negative) in children’s productive vocabulary and how parents and caregivers can support young children’s learning of emotion labels. Research suggests that toddlers use the dynamics of language input to construct emotional word meanings and provides new techniques for defining the quality of infant-directed speech.
“Our research shows that children are more likely to know a given emotion label when they also know many other related valence words,” said Mira Nencheva, a graduate student in psychology at Princeton University. “If parents surround emotion labels with related words, they may support children’s learning. For example, by introducing the label happy, a parent or caregiver can provide information about the situation or actions surrounding the emotion (such as “ Rosa got a wonderful gift for her birthday! She was so happy! ”)
The researchers used data collected in North America and the United Kingdom between 1962 and 2009, from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory Wordbank database. Across five studies, they analyzed the vocabularies of 5,520 young children (1,989 females and 2,2015 males) between the ages of 16 and 30 months, 2,202 identified as White, 67 as Asian, 222 as Black, 131 as Hispanic, and 93 as others. The Wordbank database asked caregivers to report which 680 words their child understands and speaks. The words included in the database were selected to represent the children’s first words.
The data was examined following the following steps:
- In Studies 1 and 2, researchers examined 1- to 2-year-old children’s valence word development and looked at the rate at which they learned emotional and neutral words.
- The research helped reveal that learning begins with concrete neutral words (i.e., spoon or shake) and then expands to positive and negative words.
This is consistent with previous research showing that older children learn negative and positive words before neutral and abstract words.
- Study 3 examined how caregivers use within-context emotion labels that match in valence.
- Study 4 investigated whether variability in the extent to which different emotion labels lend themselves to such co-occurrence in child-directed speech predicts earlier or later production.
- Study 5 examined the longitudinal hypothesis that children produce emotion labels in more precise contexts when their caregivers surround the emotion labels with similar words.
Studies 3, 4, and 5 show that caregiver input can include consistent links between emotion labels and words with similar valence, which can facilitate children’s learning over time. In all, research shows that it may be important for caregivers to provide related words when labeling emotions to help children make sense of complex words. The findings also have implications for understanding children’s word learning beyond emotional labels and valence-related words.
“Our five studies provide insights into how young children can use dynamic language to construct complex meanings,” Nencheva said. “Our intention is that our approach will help enable other researchers to quantify how caregivers dynamically use words that support children’s learning of words with complex and abstract meanings.”
The authors acknowledge several limitations in their research. For some of the analyses, they were limited by the words included in the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory Wordbank database, which included very few emotion labels. The questionnaire was also designed specifically for infants and toddlers, so future research is recommended across a broader age range, from infancy to adolescence. Future research should directly investigate the causal links between caregiver input using emotional labels and words of similar valence and children’s learning over time. Finally, parent-report measures of their children’s productive vocabulary are not as robust as child-driven measures of production and comprehension.
