title: Vocal tones influence young children's responses to prohibitions.
abstract: Vocal reactions to child transgressions convey information about the nature of those transgressions. The current research investigated children's ability to make use of such vocal reactions. Study 1 investigated infants' compliance with a vocal prohibition telling them to stay away from a toy. Compared to younger infants, older infants showed greater compliance with prohibitions elicited by moral (interpersonal harm) transgressions but not with prohibitions elicited by pragmatic (inconvenience) transgressions. Study 2 investigated preschoolers' use of firm-stern vocalizations (associated with moral transgressions) and positive vocalizations (associated with pragmatic transgressions). Most children guessed that the firm-stern vocalizations were uttered in response to a moral transgression and the positive vocalizations were uttered in response to a pragmatic transgression. These two studies suggest that children use vocal tones, along with other experiences, to guide their compliance with and interpretation of prohibitions.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. Electronic address: dahl@ucsc.edu.
authors: Audun
authors: A
authors: Dahl
authors: Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
authors: Amy Q
authors: AQ
authors: Tran
mesh_terms: D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D009014:Morals; D009034:Mother-Child Relations / Q000523:psychology; D014705:Verbal Behavior
keywords: Emotional communication; Moral development; Norms; Parent-child interactions; Social domain theory; Vocal affect