Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior research indicates that the physical context in which a word is spoken can influence how well young children learnthe word. Yet, it is unclear how variability in social contexts (e.g. emotion) may impact word learning. To assess this,the present study used a novel noun generalization task with 2-year-old children. Participants were randomly assigned toone of four emotional labeling conditions: consistently angry, consistently happy, consistently sad, or variable (one labelin each emotional tone per trial). We investigated whether the number of correct responses out of eight trials varied byemotional condition. Preliminary data from 28 (14 female) participants suggests that the percentage of correct responsesin the sad (59.4%) and happy (64.3%) conditions may be lower than in the angry (70.8%) or variable (69.6%) conditions.These results hold implications for how emotional contexts may influence childrens ability to learn new words.