Overcoming Lexical Bias in the Judgment of Emotion in Speech: Role of Executive Function and Usefulness Understanding in Young Children

Abstract

Studies have shown that when listening to speech sounds that express different emotions through prosodic and lexical content, adults tend to judge a speaker’s emotion based on prosody, while young children tend to judge a speaker’s emotion based on lexical content. This study examined three factors that can help 3- to 5-year-old children overcome their lexical bias and use prosody to judge a speaker’s emotion. The results showed that an understanding of the usefulness of prosody to infer emotion from speech influenced young children’s tendency to focus on prosody, and that only children with well-developed executive functions could judge a speaker’s emotions by focusing on prosody—to the extent that they could read emotions from it. To achieve this, in addition to understanding, children needed to switch their attention away from lexical content and read emotions from prosody.

Keywords:

• Young children
• emotion inference
• speech
• lexical bias

Disclosure statement

The author declares that there are no conflicts of interest.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, SI. The data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Center of Developmental and Educational Research.

Notes on contributors

Shinnosuke Ikeda

Shinnosuke Ikeda, Faculty of Humanities, Kyoto University of Advanced Science.