Contextual factors influencing children’s use of emotional prosody in an unfamiliar language

Previous research demonstrated that 4-year-olds correctly match emotional prosody in unfamiliar language utterances to corresponding faces but do not use the same utterances to identify a speaker's intended referent. The present study examined whether incorporating situational and utterance-based cues influenced English-speaking children's use of emotional prosody in Arabic sentences. In two experiments, children were tasked with using emotional prosody (happy- and sad-sounding) to identify a speaker's intended referent amongst two competing alternatives (intact vs. broken object). Situational cues were incorporated through the introduction of a speaker emphasising the referential nature of the task (Expt. 1), and utterance-based cues involved embedding English-Arabic cognate nouns within the otherwise unfamiliar Arabic utterances (Expt. 2). Results from both experiments indicated that 4-year-olds did not use emotional prosody in Arabic to identify the speaker's intended object. Eight-year-old children identified the target referent above-chance with sad- but not happy-sounding prosody irrespective of the presence of situational cues (Expt. 1). When utterance-based cues were provided through embedding English-Arabic cognates in the emotional utterance (Expt. 2), 6- and 8-year-olds used emotional prosody to infer referential intent. Together, findings suggest that children's use of unfamiliar language emotional prosody for referential reasoning is enhanced by situational and utterance-based cues.