title: Development in children's interpretation of pitch cues to emotions.
abstract: Young infants respond to positive and negative speech prosody (A. Fernald, 1993), yet 4-year-olds rely on lexical information when it conflicts with paralinguistic cues to approval or disapproval (M. Friend, 2003). This article explores this surprising phenomenon, testing one hundred eighteen 2- to 5-year-olds' use of isolated pitch cues to emotions in interactive tasks. Only 4- to 5-year-olds consistently interpreted exaggerated, stereotypically happy or sad pitch contours as evidence that a puppet had succeeded or failed to find his toy (Experiment 1) or was happy or sad (Experiments 2, 3). Two- and 3-year-olds exploited facial and body-language cues in the same task. The authors discuss the implications of this late-developing use of pitch cues to emotions, relating them to other functions of pitch.
authors.affiliation: University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA. cmquam@gmail.com
authors.forename: Carolyn
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Quam
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Swingley
mesh_terms: D001245:Association Learning; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D009633:Nonverbal Communication; D010898:Pitch Perception; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception