Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-19T02:23:19.011Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bilingualism and children's use of paralinguistic cues to interpret emotion in speech*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2011

W. QUIN YOW  and
ELLEN M. MARKMAN
W. QUIN YOW*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
ELLEN M. MARKMAN
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
Address for correspondence: W. Quin Yow, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Jordan Hall Building 420, Stanford, CA 94305-2130, USA[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Preschoolers tend to rely on what speakers say rather than how they sound when interpreting a speaker's emotion while adults rely instead on tone of voice. However, children who have a greater need to attend to speakers’ communicative requirements, such as bilingual children, may be more adept in using paralinguistic cues (e.g. tone of voice) when interpreting a speaker's affect. We explored whether bilingual children are better able than monolingual children to use paralinguistic cues when interpreting a speaker's emotion. While monolingual and bilingual children were equally capable of identifying emotion using affective information in low-pass filtered speech stimuli (Study 1), bilingual children were better able than monolingual children to use tone of voice when judging emotion in natural speech when content was clear (Study 2).

Keywords

bilingualismtone of voiceemotion
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , October 2011 , pp. 562 - 569
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We are especially grateful to Bruce Morton for generously sharing his stimuli. We thank the children and parents who participated and to the teachers and staff of Bing Nursery School. We thank Adrienne Sussman and Suejung Shin for helping to collect and code the data. Portions of this work were previously presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society of Research in Child Development in Boston (March 2009). This work was partially supported by the Tan Kah Kee Postgraduate Scholarship to the first author.

References

Ackerman, B. (1982). Contextual integration and utterance interpretation: The ability of children and adults to interpret sarcastic utterances. Child Development, 53, 1075–1083.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ackerman, B. (1986). Children's sensitivity to comprehension failure in interpreting a nonliteral use of an utterance. Child Development, 57, 458–497.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andrews, J., Rosenblatt, E., Malkus, U., Gardner, H., & Winner, E. (1986). Children's abilities to distinguish metaphoric and ironic utterances from mistakes and lies. Communication and Cognition, 19, 281–298.Google Scholar
Argyle, M., Alkema, F., & Gilmour, R. (1971). The communication of friendly and hostile attitudes by verbal and nonverbal signals. European Journal of Social Psychology, 1, 385–402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baldwin, D. A., & Moses, L. J. (1994). Early understanding of referential intent and attentional focus: Evidence from language and emotion. In Lewis, C. & Mitchell, P. (eds.), Childrens’ early understanding of mind: Origins and development, pp. 133–156. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Ben-Zeev, S. (1977). The effect of bilingualism in children from Spanish–English low economic neighborhoods on cognitive development and cognitive strategy. Working Papers in Bilingualism, 14, 83–122.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E. (1999). Cognitive complexity and attentional control in the bilingual mind. Child Development, 70, 636–644.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E., & Martin, M. (2004). Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: Evidence from the dimensional change card sorting task. Developmental Science, 7, 325–339.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bolinger, D. W. (1989). Intonation and its uses. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borke, H. (1971). Interpersonal perception of young children: Egocentrism or empathy? Developmental Psychology, 5, 263–269.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brainard, D. H. (1997). The psychophysics toolbox. Spatial Vision, 10, 433–436.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bryant, G. A., & Fox Tree, J. E. (2002). Recognizing verbal irony in spontaneous speech. Metaphor and Symbol, 17 (2), 99–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buck, G. M., Small, M. E., Schisterman, E. F., Lyon, N. R., & Rogers, B. T. (2000). Extreme prematurity and school outcomes. Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology, 14 (4), 324–331.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Capelli, C., Nakagawa, N., & Madden, C. (1990). How children understand sarcasm: The role of context and intonation. Child Development, 61, 1824–1841.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, S. O., Schellenbaum, G. D., & Rea, T. D. (2005). Socioeconomic status and survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Academic Emergency Medicine, 12 (10), 941–947.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Comeau, L., Genesee, F., & Lapaquette, L. (2003). The modeling hypothesis and child bilingual codemixing. International Journal of Bilingualism, 7 (2), 113–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comeau, L., Genesee, F., & Mendelson, M. (2007). Bilingual children's repairs of breakdowns in communication. Journal of Child Language, 34, 159–174.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Costa, A., Hernández, M., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2008). Bilingualism aids conflict resolution: Evidence from the ANT task. Cognition, 106 (1), 59–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cummins, J., & Mulcahy, R. (1978). Orientation to language in Ukrainian–English bilingual children. Child Development, 49, 479–482.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A. (1974). On saying what you mean without meaning what you say. Papers from the Tenth Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 117–127. Chicago: Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
de Groot, A., Kaplan, J., Rosenblatt, E., Dews, S., & Winner, E. (1995). Understanding versus discriminating nonliteral utterances: Evidence for a dissociation. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 10, 255–273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demorest, A., Meyer, C., Phelps, E., Gardner, H., & Winner, E. (1984). Words speak louder than actions: Understanding deliberately false remarks. Child Development, 55, 1527–1534.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dimitrovsky, L. (1964). The ability to identify the emotional meaning of vocal expressions at successive age levels. In Davitz, J. (ed.), The communication of emotional meaning, pp. 69–86. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Egan, O. (1980). Intonation and meaning. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 9, 23–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ekman, P. (1985). Telling lies. New York: Berkeley Books.Google Scholar
Fernald, A. (1989). Intonation and communicative intent in mothers’ speech to infants: Is melody the message? Child Development, 60, 1497–1510.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Friend, M. (2000). Developmental changes in sensitivity to vocal paralanguage. Developmental Science, 3, 148–162.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Friend, M., & Bryant, J. B. (2000). A developmental lexical bias in the interpretation of discrepant messages. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 46, 342–369.Google ScholarPubMed
Frye, D., Zelazo, P. D., & Burack, J. A. (1998). Cognitive complexity and control: I. Theory of mind in typical and atypical development. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7, 116–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Furth, S. L., Garg, P. P., Neu, A. M., Hwang, W., Flush, B. A., & Powe, N. R. (2000). Racial differences in access to the kidney transplant waiting list for children and adolescents with end-stage renal disease. Pediatrics, 106 (4), 756–761.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fussell, S., & Moss, L. (eds.) (1998). Figurative language in emotional communication. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Genesee, F., Tucker, G. R., & Lambert, W. E. (1975). Communication skills of bilingual children. Child Development, 46 (4), 1010–1014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldie, P. (2002). Emotions, feelings and intentionality. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1, 235–254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hallstrom, A., Boutin, P., Cobb, L., & Johnson, E. (1993). Socioeconomic status and prediction of ventricular fibrillation survival. American Journal of Public Health, 83 (2), 245–248.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hays, W. (1973). Statistics for the social sciences. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, C. (1991). An introduction to bilingualism. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Kovács, Á. M., & Mehler, J. (2009). Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (16), 6556–6560.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kreuz, R. J. (1996). The use of verbal irony: Cues and constraints. In Mio, J. S. & Katz, A. N. (eds.), Metaphor: Implications and applications, pp. 23–38. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Kreuz, R. J. (2000). The production and processing of verbal irony. Metaphor and Symbol, 15, 99–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kreuz, R. J., & Roberts, R. M. (1995). Two cues for verbal irony: Hyperbole and the ironic tone of voice. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 10, 21–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, W., & Fanshel, D. (1977). Therapeutic discourse: Psychotherapy as conversation. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Martin-Rhee, M. M., & Bialystok, E. (2008). The development of two types of inhibitory control in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11 (1), 81–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MathWorks, T. (2007). From http://www.mathworks.com (retrieved August 2007).Google Scholar
Mazzocco, M. M. M. (1999). Developmental changes in indicators that literal interpretations of homonyms are associated with conflict. Journal of Child Language, 26, 393–417.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mehrabian, A., & Wiener, M. (1967). Decoding of inconsistent communications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6, 109–114.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Milosky, L. M., & Ford, J. A. (1997). The role of prosody in children's inferences of ironic intent. Discourse Processes, 23, 47–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, W. G., Zhou, Y., Chavez, J. M., & Guzman, B. L. (1992). Reaction time, attention, and impulsivity in epilepsy. Pediatric Neurology, 8 (1), 19–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morton, J. B., & Munakata, Y. (2002). Are you listening? Exploring a developmental knowledge–action dissociation in a speech interpretation task. Developmental Science, 5, 435–440.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morton, J. B., & Trehub, S. E. (2001). Children's understanding of emotion in speech. Child Development, 72, 834–843.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morton, J. B., Trehub, S. E., & Zelazo, P. D. (2003). Sources of inflexibility in children's understanding of emotion in speech. Child Development, 74, 1857–1868.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ortony, A. (1975). Why metaphors are necessary and not just nice. Educational Theory, 25, 45–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pelli, D. (1997). The videotoolbox software for visual psychophysics: Transforming numbers into movies. Spatial Vision, 10, 437.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rathore, S. S., Masoudi, F. A., Wang, Y., Curtis, J. P., Foody, J. M., Havranek, E. P., & Krumholz, H. M. (2006). Socioeconomic status, treatment, and outcomes among elderly patients hospitalized with heart failure: Findings from the National Heart Failure Project. American Heart Journal, 152 (2), 371–378.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roberts, R. M., & Kreuz, R. J. (1994). Why do people use figurative language? Psychological Science, 5, 159–163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rockwell, P. (2000). Lower, slower, louder: Vocal cues of sarcasm. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29, 483–495.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saunders, G. (1983). Bilingual children: Guidance for the family. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Siegal, M., Iozzi, L., & Surian, L. (2009). Bilingualism and conversational understanding. Cognition, 110, 115–122.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Solomon, D., & Ali, F. A. (1972). Age trends in the perception of verbal reinforcers. Developmental Psychology, 7, 238–243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sullivan, K., Winner, E., & Hopfield, N. (1995). How children tell a lie from a joke: The role of second-order mental state attributions. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 13, 191–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaillancourt, C., Lui, A., De Maio, V. J., Wells, G. A., & Stiell, I. G. (2008). Socioeconomic status influences bystander CPR and survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest victims. Resuscitation, 79 (3), 417–423.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ward, M. M. (2008). Socioeconomic status and the incidence of ESRD. American Journal of Kidney Diseases, 51 (4), 563–572.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Westenberg, P. M., Siebelink, B. M., Warmenhoven, N. J. C., & Treffers, P. D. A. (1999). Separation anxiety and overanxious disorders: Relations to age and level of psychosocial maturity. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 38 (8), 1000–1007.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Winner, E., & Leekam, S. (1991). Distinguishing irony from deception: Understanding the speaker's second-order intention. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9, 257–270.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yow, W. Q., & Markman, E. M. (2007). Monolingual and bilingual children's use of mutual exclusivity assumption and pragmatic cues in word learning. Poster presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Boston, MA.Google Scholar
Yow, W. Q., & Markman, E. M. (2009). Understanding a speaker's communicative intent: Bilingual children's heightened sensitivity to referential gestures. In Chandlee, J., Franchini, M., Lord, S. & Rheiner, G. (eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (vol. 2), pp. 646–657.Google Scholar
Zelazo, P. D., & Frye, D. (1998). Cognitive complexity and control: II. The development of executive function. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7, 121–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar