Emotion word development in bilingual children living in majority and minority contexts

Date Issued
2021-11-03Publisher Version
10.1093/applin/amab071Author(s)
Ahn, Sunyoung
Chang, Charles B.
Metadata
Show full item recordPermanent Link
https://hdl.handle.net/2144/43531Version
Accepted manuscript
Citation (published version)
S. Ahn, C.B. Chang. "Emotion word development in bilingual children living in majority and minority contexts." Applied Linguistics, 2021; amab071. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amab071Abstract
The lexicon of emotion words is fundamental to interpersonal communication. To examine how emotion word acquisition interacts with societal context, the present study investigated emotion word development in three groups of child Korean users aged 4–13 years: those who use Korean primarily outside the home as a majority language (MajKCs) or inside the home as a minority language (MinKCs), and those who use Korean both inside and outside the home (KCs). These groups, along with a group of L1 Korean adults, rated the emotional valence of 61 Korean emotion words varying in frequency, valence, and age of acquisition. Results showed KCs, MajKCs, and MinKCs all converging toward adult-like valence ratings by ages 11–13 years; unlike KCs and MajKCs, however, MinKCs did not show age-graded development and continued to diverge from adults in emotion word knowledge by these later ages. These findings support the view that societal context plays a major role in emotion word development, offering one reason for the intergenerational communication difficulties reported by immigrant families.
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