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…

Explored in three experiments children's understanding of emotion in speech. Found gradual developmental change from 4-year-olds' focus on content to adult's focus on paralanguage. Children exhibited greater response latencies to utterances with conflicting cues than to those with nonconflicting cues. They accurately labeled affective paralanguage…