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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, USAquin@psych.stanford.edu
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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

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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.

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