Charting the frequency and diversity of emotion words in children’s language: written language matters

Emotion words allow us to identify, describe and regulate our emotional states. Emotion vocabulary grows through childhood, but little research has considered emotion words in the context of children’s written language. To address this gap, we used a cross-corpus developmental approach to chart the emergence of emotion words in children’s reading experience and in their own writing. For comparison, we also captured occurrences of the same set of emotion words in age-matched samples of children’s spoken language experience via caregiver child-directed speech and television programmes. We observed that even books targeted at preschoolers for shared reading contained more unique emotion words than both caregiver speech and television language. As the targeted age of books increased through mid-childhood and early adolescence, the frequency and diversity of emotion words increased further. This pattern was also seen in children’s own writing, with more unique and diverse emotion words being used by older children. These findings indicate that written language requires children to comprehend and produce emotion words that are rare in everyday conversations. We speculate that this linguistic experience may play a role in emotional development by providing opportunities to consider and communicate mental situations beyond the everyday.