title: Children's judgments of emotion from conflicting cues in speech: why 6-year-olds are so inflexible.
abstract: Six-year-old children can judge a speaker's feelings either from content or paralanguage but have difficulty switching the basis of their judgments when these cues conflict. This inflexibility may relate to a lexical bias in 6-year-olds' judgments. Two experiments tested this claim. In Experiment 1, 6-year-olds (n = 40) were as inflexible when switching from paralanguage to content as when switching from content to paralanguage. In Experiment 2, 6-year-olds (n = 32) and adults (n = 32) had more difficulty when switching between conflicting emotion cues than conflicting nonemotional cues. Thus, 6-year-olds' inflexibility appears to be tied to the presence of conflicting emotion cues in speech rather than a bias to judge a speaker's feelings from content.
authors.affiliation: University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Waxer
authors.forename: J Bruce
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Morton
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D056345:Theory of Mind; D014833:Voice Quality