Cultural experiences can influence how people attend to different emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly describes feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This cross-cultural study examined children's attention to emotional cues in spoken words. The sample consisted of 121 European American (EA) and 120…

Using a novel emotional perspective-taking task, this study investigated 4-year-olds' (n = 97) use of a speaker's emotional prosody to make inferences about the speaker's emotional state and, correspondingly, their communicative intent. Eye gaze measures indicated preschoolers used emotional perspective inferences to guide their real-time…

Two experiments compared the abilities of third and sixth graders and adults to recognize sarcasm given context and intonation cues. Children recognized sarcasm only when given a speaker's sarcastic intonation cue, even when context strongly indicated a nonliteral interpretation. (BC)