The dynamics of emotion and speech in early caregiver-child interactions

Abstract

From their first interactions with caregivers, infants begin to make sense of a complex and dynamic world brimming with sounds, words, sensations, and feelings. Two dimensions of this social world - speech and emotion - offer infants a unique window into the minds of others and a way to communicate their own internal states and needs. The studies in this dissertation demonstrate that emotion and language are dynamically coupled across multiple timescales. First, I show that developmental changes in emotion transitions relate to both general and specific emotion vocabulary during the first five years of life. Second, I demonstrate that there are dynamic, moment-to-moment links between affect, communication, and word learning in children’s home environments. Finally, I examine how children use the distribution of positive and negative words across utterances in order to learn emotion labels. Together, the studies in this dissertation advance our understanding of how language and emotion are intertwined in children’s lives, spanning milliseconds and years. The emphasis on children’s everyday, dynamic communicative experience can spark new interdisciplinary directions at the interface of cognitive development and clinical affective science, with the translational goal of supporting children’s learning and long-term well-being.