Emotional Words, Emotional Contexts: Investigating Emotional Valence in Children’s Writing and Word Learning

There is a relationship between the emotional valence of a word and the valence of its surrounding language context in adult language, and context valence predicts how well adults learn new words. Little is known about whether this extends to children. To address this, we first conducted a computational analysis to quantify the relationship between the emotional properties of words and their contexts in a large corpus of stories written by children (N = 103,541; approximately 55 million word tokens, age 7-13 years). As predicted, there was a positive correlation (r = 0.46) between word and context valence, and this was stable across age. We then conducted a pre-registered word learning experiment to investigate how emotional narrative context shapes the learning of novel adjectives during independent reading. Children (N = 120, age 7-11 years, 59 girls) were presented with 15 novel words embedded in 30 short narratives of either neutral, negative, or positive valence. We found that children learned novel adjectives from their reading experience, and older children outperformed younger children in word recognition and valence judgment. Novel adjectives read in more emotional (positive or negative) contexts were recognised more accurately than those read in neutral narratives. Children inferred word valence from narrative context, demonstrating that context valence is an effective cue for word learning. We discuss how affective associations build from children’s experience of words in emotional contexts, consistent with affective embodiment supporting children’s learning of abstract concepts.