Our Research

Exploring Children’s use of Emotional Prosody in Referential Communication

Imagine hearing a friend exclaim: “Get out!” Here, your friend’s intended meaning (i.e., whether she wants you to leave immediately or wants you to know she is experiencing utter disbelief) is markedly different if she uses an angry-sounding voice versus an excited-sounding one. As this example illustrates, in order to gauge communicative intent, listeners often must draw upon cues beyond the words themselves. One means by which listeners may infer communicate intent is to attend to emotional prosody, otherwise known as vocal affect or tone of voice.

Previous research has shown that children as young as 4-years-old have the ability to use a speaker’s vocal affect (e.g., happy-sounding voice vs. sad-sounding voice) to guide language processing. For example, imagine a situation where there are two beach balls: one that is shiny and new and another that is old and deflated. When a speaker says, “Look! Look at the ball!” children will use the speaker’s tone of voice in order to determine which ball they are talking about. In the present study, we are using eye-tracking methodology to investigate the conditions under which young children use vocal affect as a cue to anticipate reference. Specifically, we are interested in determining whether this ability is the result of learned associations between vocal emotionality and certain objects/situations, or whether it is the result of socially enriched reasoning about a speaker. This study requires a one-time visit to the lab. 

Cross-Modal Emotion Recognition in Preschoolers

In this study, children will be presented with pictures of two emotional faces. They will then hear a voice speaking in different emotional tones, and be asked to point and look at the face that best matches the voice. This research is to help us understand better children's understanding of emotional information in language, more specifically looking at how they understand emotions that are a bit more complex than happy or sad (e.g. anger or confusion). 

This study utilizes eye-tracking technology and requires a one-time visit to the lab.