Children's Understanding of Emotion in Speech

Can children detect sarcasm? Can children detect the emotion of a speaker? Morton and Trehub published an article in volume 72 of Child Development that seeks to answer this question. In their article they explore the ability of children to detect emotion in speakers through paralinguistic cues. Paralanguage can be described as non-verbal elements of communication such as pitch, volume, rhythym, gestures and other cues. So the question they asked the question: Do children tend to focus more on the content of utterances, or the underlying paralinguistic aspects of voice sounds? This was tested in three experiments.

           

The first experiment consisted of 120 participants. 100 of them were divided between 4 and 10 years old. The remaining 20 were young adults, mostly college students. They were each given 20 utterances, 10 with happy content and 10 with sad content. However, the happy content used sad paralanguage (lower pitch, attenuated pitch, slower speaking rate) and the sad content used happy paralanguage (higher pitch, greater pitch and loudness variation, and faster speaking rate as compared to the sad paralanguage). The participants were asked to judge if an utterance was happy or sad by saying so or pointing to a sign with a happy face or sad face. The results showed that the 4 year olds were most likely to judge the emotion of an utterance based on content and that adults almost always judged emotion based on paralanguage. The results showed that 10 year olds were more likely than younger children to judge emotion based on paralanguage. There seemed to be a correlation between age and the use of paralanguage in determining emotion.

The second experiment was conducted to decide whether the youngest children (four year olds) were able to judge paralanguage in speech at all. To do this, the experimenters recorded utterances in Italian, so the children would not understand the content, and played them to the children, who were asked to tell if the utterance was happy or sad. The employment of happy vs. sad paralanguage that was described in experiment one was used here as well. The participants were all four-year-olds (8 boys and 12 girls).  The results showed that the children performed better than 80% correct. Some of the children had a tendency to alternate between the two options due to shyness, boredom, etc. When these results were discarded, the children performed better than 90% correct. The results of this second experiment seem to suggest that children are very capable of using paralanguage to determine emotion.

The third experiment attempted to determine whether young children also understood the paralanguage in the utterances from experiment one. To do this they pass-filtered the utterances, which destroys many of the phonetic clues and makes the content largely unintelligible, while preserving the paralinguistic clues of pitch, volume, and speed. 20 four-year-olds, 20 five-year-olds, and 20 six-year-olds were used (half male and half female). The results showed that children as young as four were able to pick up on paralinguistic cues. The six-year-olds did better than the two other groups. It is unclear whether or not this is due to better perception of paralanguage or greater ability to sit through a mundane task.

Summary
What's very interesting here is that young children seem to have the ability to decode emotion in utterances by using paralinguistic cues. However, the youngest children studied, when content and paralanguage conflicted, almost invariable trusted the content over the paralanguage.

Language Change in Subcarpathia

The countries of eastern Europe have seen radical border changes throughout their history. During the last century, following major shifts in political power, individuals and communities have struggled to keep a linguistic and national identity amidst the rule of often oppressive ruling governments. One such area of interest is that of Subcarpathia in the modern-day southwest Ukraine. This region was originally part of Hungary. After The Treaty of Trianon following World War I, this area was given to then Czechoslovakia. Other areas of Hungary were distributed to many neighboring countries, causing Hungary to lose about 70% of the land it previously held and about 65% of its previous inhabitants. The region of Subcarpathia was rejoined to Hungary briefly during World War II and then stripped again at the war's conclusion and handed over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialists Republic. How has this political juggling affected the Hungarian language of this area's inhabitants?

A walk through the region of Subcarpathia today reveals a merging of two worlds. Street and city names are still often written in the two languages of the region. Many villages in this area still maintain a Hungarian speaking majority while much of the official business and education is conducted in Ukrainian. Because linguistic analysis of this kind was not permitted until after the fall of communism, areas like that of Subcarpathia offer linguists a unique opportunity to study language stratification that has occurred over the course of almost a century.

I recently read one such study conducted in the summer of 1996 and published in volume 19 of Multilingua in 2000. The article is titled The Sociolinguistic Stratification of Hungarian in Subcarpathia. Linguists from the University of Szeged in Hungary went to various regions of Subcarpathia to evaluate the manner in which Hungarian was spoken. Nearly 150 adult minority Hungarians were studied, representing various age groups, education levels, and locales. They were given a questionnaire and asked to fill in the missing word of a sentence. In each question there were only two possible answer choices-- one that was considered to be standard Hungarian based on similar surveys conducted in Hungary and one that was considered to be non-standard. The non-standard forms are considered by those living in Hungary to be associated with lower education levels and rural lifestyle. The group hypothesized that ethnic Hungarians of Subcarpathia would be more likely to choose the non-standard forms.

The results of the study seem to support the experimenters' hypothesis. Hungarian-speakers of Subcarpathia were more likely in almost all instances to choose the non-standard form than Hungarian nationals. However, the results raised an interesting point--that sociolinguistic stratification is by no means a uniform process. While there were some trends among age, locale, education level, etc, language change among individuals was largely unpredictable. There are so many factors that play in to this kind of stratification that effectively measuring all of them would be nearly impossible.

The study raises some interesting questions. How does the political language affect the native language? How does this differ in areas with stronger political assertion? What will the Hungarian language of Subcarpathia look like yet a hundred years from now? Will it still be spoken?