Emotional language and gesture production of preschoolers

Children's understanding and learning of emotion concepts are important for their social-cognitive development and their general and emotion-specific language skills. As language is multimodal, co-speech gestures children use can also be associated with their emotion understanding. This study examined 4- to 6-year-old children's (n=67) multimodal language use for emotions and its link to their emotion understanding. Children's use of emotional speech and multimodal emotional talk were assessed with an Emotional-Narrative Task that included negative, positive and neutral stories. Emotion understanding was assessed via the Emotion-Matching Task with four subtasks: Expression-Matching Knowledge, Emotion-Situation Knowledge, Expressive-Emotion Knowledge, and Receptive-Emotion Knowledge. We asked three questions: (1) Did children's emotion understanding differ by age from 4-year to 6-year (2) Did children produce more emotional multimodal language (speech + gesture) in emotional stories compared to neutral stories? (3) Was children's emotion understanding in different tasks, including both general and situation related emotional knowledge, predicted by children's emotional talk and gestures? Results showed that age was significantly correlated with the total score in the Emotion-Matching Task. Children produced significantly more multimodal emotional talk in the negative story than the neutral story. Children's Emotion-Matching Task scores, particularly for the Receptive-Emotion Knowledge test, were predicted by multimodal emotional talk, controlling for age, gender, and general language skills. Thus, multimodal emotional language could be associated with emotion concept development. This study contributed to the field by explaining the relationship between concept learning and multimodal language demonstrated by abstract emotion concepts.