2016 Volume 23 Issue 1 Pages 49-64
In an utterance, paralinguistic information sometimes conveys the speaker’s affect
differently from that which the lexical content indicates. In such a case, adults rely
on paralinguistic information more heavily than lexical content to judge the speaker’s
affect. However, young children often show a lexical bias (Friend & Bryant, 2000);
they rely on lexical contents rather than paralinguistic information. Why do young
children show this bias although even infants are very sensitive to speaker affect con-
veyed by emotional prosody? We reviewed the literature and found two factors that
may contribute to the appearance of this bias in young children. First, once children
become capable of understanding speech, they rely more on lexical contents than emo-
tional prosody, as their ability to infer speaker affect based on emotional prosody is still
not as developed as adults’. Second, due to their immature ability to shift attention,
young children have difficulty in transferring focus from lexical contents to emotional
prosody when they encounter utterances whose lexical content indicates a different af-
fect from the one inferred from the emotional prosody. We also suggest that future
research should explore cultural influence on the appearance and disappearance of lex-
ical bias as well as investigate the relationship between infants’ implicit sensitivity to,
and children’s and adults’ explicit understanding of, speaker affect through speech.
