Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study, we examine how the structure of emotion language, both in caregiver emotion language input and children's own vocabularies, relates to children's organization of emotions along an internal-external dimension. English-speaking children aged 4-6 years completed an internal-external emotion categorization task and a vignette-based emotion inference task. Caregiver emotion language was sampled during a semi-naturalistic book-reading interaction. Results indicated that repeated exposure to a small set of emotion words in caregiver input was associated with more adult-like internal–external categorization, whereas greater lexical diversity in children's own emotion vocabularies was associated with less consistent categorization during this period. Together, these findings indicate that early emotion concept development is shaped not simply by the amount of emotion language children hear or use, but also by the timing and structure of that input over development.