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The use of emotional paralinguistic cues in monolingual and bilingual children
Mid Sweden University, Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Psychology.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-7251-5263
Mid Sweden University, Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Psychology.
2017 (English)Conference paper, Poster (with or without abstract) (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Until the age of around 7-8 years old, children primarily rely on the lexical content of an utterance rather than on paralinguistic cues (e.g., emotional prosody) to identify a speaker’s emotional state. This bias gradually disappears by the age of 9. From then on, children start using paralinguistic cues to identify their interlocutor’s emotional state, even when the lexical content and paralinguistic cues are incongruent. This skill is important to understand sarcasm and detect lies for instance. Bilinguals must focus on the language used by their interlocutor to determine which language to use, while this is not necessary for monolinguals. This difference could have an effect on how and when the bias disappears for bilinguals. As bilinguals need to be more attentive to the speaker, the bias could disappear earlier. However, as bilinguals need to attend to the language used by the interlocutor to a larger extent, this could hinder emotional prosody processing and delay development. To this end, we designed a study where we asked monolinguals and bilinguals between 6-9 years to identify the emotional valence of spoken words. The words were positive, negative or neutral and were expressed in a happy, angry or neutral tone of voice. The task was to identify either the emotional valence of the word content or the valence of the prosody. Preliminary results show an expected effect of congruence, with more accurate responses to congruent compared to incongruent trials. Further, monolinguals performed better on the lexical content task compared to the emotional prosody task. Although biliguals' overall performance was not better than their monolingual peers, bilingual children seemed to performed equally well on both the lexical content and emotional prosody tasks. Our preliminary results suggest that bilingualism during childhood may affect the course of development of the lexical bias.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2017.
National Category
Psychology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:miun:diva-32164OAI: oai:DiVA.org:miun-32164DiVA, id: diva2:1160605
Conference
Conference on Multilingualism 2017, Groningen, Netherlands, November 6-8, 2017
Available from: 2017-11-27 Created: 2017-11-27 Last updated: 2017-11-28Bibliographically approved

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Champoux-Larsson, Marie-FranceDylman, Alexandra

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf