Children's understanding of emotion in speech

Children's understanding of emotion in speech was explored in three experim ents. In Experiment 1, 4- to 10-year-old children and adults (N = 165) judg ed the happiness or sadness of the speaker from cues conveyed by propositio nal content and affective paralanguage. When the cues conflicted (i.e., a h appy situation was described with sad paralanguage), children relied;primar ily on content, in contrast to adults, who relied on paralanguage. There we re gradual developmental changes from 4-year-olds' almost exclusive focus o n content to adults' exclusive focus on paralanguage. Children of all ages exhibited greater response latencies to utterances with conflicting cues th an to those with nonconflicting cues, indicating that they processed both s ources of emotional information. Children accurately labeled the affective paralanguage when the propositional cues to emotion were obscured by a fore ign language (Experiment 2, N = 20) or by low-pass filtering (Experiment 3, N = 60). The findings are consistent with children's limited understanding of the communicative functions of affective paralanguage.