Project team: Rainy Dong, Kate Nation, Robert Hepach, Matthew Mak
Emotions play a pivotal role in human experiences and are closely intertwined with language structure and use in both adults and children (Lindquist, 2017). Understanding emotional language, such as the term "frustrated", is crucial for emotional comprehension during development (Grosse et al., 2021; Nook et al., 2020). Despite the acknowledged importance of language in emotional concept development, little research has explored the link between emotions and written language in particular. Written language is qualitatively different from spoken language, being linguistically more complex and diverse (Dawson et al., 2021). Written language might be instrumental in conveying nuanced emotional concepts.
Given the lack of research in the field, my DPhil projects first employed the data-driven approach of analysing developmental language corpora, to reveal patterns in language use and answer important questions regarding the relationship between language and emotion. I started with looking at emotion words, or feeling state terms, which are more diverse in children’s book language (picture books and story books) than spoken language (television programmes and child-directed speech), even controlling for targeted age. Additionally, I recognised that emotion language is more than just feeling state terms, so I conducted sentiment analysis to consider all words that have an emotional connotation, using a large corpus of children’s story writing (N > 100,000). I applied sentiment analysis to a large corpus of stories written by children aged 7-13, to identify emotional content in children’s free narrative writing, and to investigate how this changed through development and between genders. I found that the emotional association of words in children’s stories decreased with age, and girls wrote more positively than boys.
To delve deeper into the increasing negativity observed with age and the greater retention of negative information, I conducted experiments to examine emotional context's impact on learning novel words. Results from adults revealed that negative emotional contexts facilitated better word recall, likely due to their evolutionary significance and increased attention-capturing nature. I am currently working on extending this experimental study to primary school children (Year 3-4, Age 7-11). In summary, my DPhil research seeks to understand the developmental interplay between language and emotion, with a particular focus on written language. This research addresses a crucial knowledge gap regarding written language and emotions, holding implications for various academic and practical fields.
In summary, my DPhil research seeks to understand the developmental interplay between language and emotion, with a particular focus on written language. This research addresses a crucial knowledge gap regarding written language and emotions, holding implications for various academic and practical fields.
