This study is a continuation of Tyler Birse's Honours research project and was supervised by Dr. Susan Graham. We are immensely grateful to all the families who participated in this research!
"Low-angle photo of pink and orange balloons" by Madison Oren (@artbyhybrid) is licensed under the Unsplash License.
Imagine hearing a friend yell, “Get out!” Depending on how they say it, you can tell if they are excited about something or angry. We often look beyond people’s words to see the true intent of what they’re saying.
One cue we pay attention to is called emotional prosody, also known as vocal affect or tone of voice.
Research shows that even children as young as 4-years-old can use a speaker’s vocal affect (e.g., happy-sounding voice vs. sad-sounding voice) to help them understand what someone is saying. But how does this work in an unfamiliar language? Can they still understand the speaker’s intention when they don’t know the words?
INSIGHTS FROM OUR PAST STUDY
Earlier this year, we conducted a study using eye-tracking methodology to investigate when young children use vocal affect to anticipate what a speaker is referring to (Waly et al., in prep). Four-year-olds listened to either a happy-sounding or sad-sounding voice speaking in Polish and were asked to match the voice to a broken or fixed object on a screen (e.g., an inflated ball and a deflated ball).
The study found that 4-year-olds had difficulty pointing to or looking at the correct object that matched the voice (Waly et al., in prep).
THE CURRENT STUDY
However, earlier research suggests that preschoolers might be better at linking matching vocal tone with emotional faces rather than abstract objects (like the deflated beach ball). Now, we are repeating the task with emotional faces!
WHAT HAVE WE FOUND SO FAR?
While this study is still in progress, preliminary results indicate that 4-year-olds do respond to the emotional face task differently than they do to the object-based task. In contrast to our previous study, it seems that children are able to point to the correct emotional face!
The findings of this study help us learn more about children’s language and emotional development. This knowledge can help parents, educators, psychologists, and researchers gain insights into how children understand and process emotions, and interact with others. As well, this research offers a window into potential developmental, social, and academic outcomes later in life, as the ability to recognize emotions, particularly during childhood and adolescence, is linked to improved academic and social skills.
We are currently conducting a study for 8 to 8.5-year-olds using a similar task!
To participate, children must speak at least 80% English in the home and have no prior exposure to the Arabic language. If you would like to part in this study, please contact yomna.waly@ucalgary.ca or sign up for our database!
Comments