Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Young children can apply certain emotion words in a manner that is too wide for facial expressions or situations anduse other emotion words too narrowly. To explore the extent to which children’s overextension or underextension of emotionwords is influenced by mothers’ use of those words, the present study analyzed how mothers talk to their 15- to 18-month-oldchildren. Mothers were asked to explain to their children the emotions of a model using particular facial expressions or thoseof characters in stories. The results indicated that mothers used some emotion words in a manner that was too wide and otheremotion words too narrowly. Mothers’ use of emotion words is partly related to children’s application patterns of those words,especially regarding facial expressions. Regarding the use of emotion words for characters in stories, other factors aside frommothers’ use can contribute to children’s semantic domain of emotion.