Charting the frequency and diversity of emotion words in children’s language: written language matters

Emotion words allow us to identify, describe, and regulate our emotional states. Emotion vocabularygrows through childhood, but little research has considered emotion words in the context of children’swritten language. To address this gap, we used a cross-corpus developmental approach to chart theemergence of emotion words in children’s reading experience, and in their own writing. Forcomparison, we also captured occurrences of the same set of emotion words in age-matched samplesof children’s spoken language experience via caregiver child-directed speech and televisionprogrammes. We observed that even books targeted at pre-schoolers for shared reading containedmore unique emotion words than both caregiver speech and television language. As the targeted ageof books increased through mid-childhood and early adolescence, the frequency and diversity ofemotion words increased further. This pattern was also seen in children’s own writing, with moreunique and diverse emotion words being used by older children. These findings indicate that writtenlanguage requires children to comprehend and produce emotion words that are rare in everydayconversations. We speculate that this linguistic experience may play a role in emotional developmentby providing opportunities to consider and communicate mental situations beyond the everyday.