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. 

Preschoolers' Social Categories

In this study, we are exploring the development of social categories in 4 and 5-year-olds. One way that children develop and use categories is by considering how people interact with one another. We are interested in investigating how children predict which social group an individual might belong to and whether they pay attention to helpful and harmful behaviours.

The study involves your child listening to a story about two different groups of characters and watching the characters interact on the screen. We will then ask your child to point to different objects and characters on the screen.