Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People from varied cultural backgrounds differ in their attention to particular aspects of emotional cues. Whereassemantic content explicitly expresses feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This study exam-ined the attention to different emotional cues in European-American and Chinese children. Participants were 121 European-American and 120 Chinese children (4-9 years old). They played two games in which they listened to spoken words and judgedthe pleasantness of the word meaning while ignoring the vocal tone (meaning game) or judged the pleasantness of the vocaltone while ignoring the word meaning (tone game). Preliminary results showed that European-American children paid moreattention to word meaning than did Chinese children. Additionally, older (8-9 years old) Chinese children attended more tovocal tone than did their European-American counterparts. The results suggest that children acquire culturally specific attentionbias by 8-9 years old.