Available via license: CC BY 4.0
Content may be subject to copyright.
World Languages, Literature and Cultural Studies (WLLCS) 2(1) (2023) 01-03
Quick Response Code
Access this article online
Website:
www.wllcs.com.my
DOI:
10.26480/wllcs.01.2023.01.03
Cite The A rticle: C hang Yuro u (2023).
Emoti on Word D evelopme nt of Chi nese-He ritage Chi ldren in the
Us: A Case Stu dy of Lun a and Avi a.
World Languag es, Litera ture an d Cultural Studies , 2(1): 01-03
.
ISSN: 2821-3041 (Online)
CODEN: WLLCA8
RESEARCH ARTICLE
World Languages, Literature and Cultural Studies
(WLLCS)
DOI: http://doi.org/10.26480/wllcs.01.2023.01.03
EMOTION WORD DEVELOPMENT OF CHINESE-HERITAGE CHILDREN IN THE US: A
CASE STUDY OF LUNA AND AVIA
Chang Yurou
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Computer Network Information Center, Beijing, China.
*Corresponding Author Email: yurou_chang@foxmail.com
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
ARTICLE DETAILS
ABSTRACT
Article History:
Received 24 September 2022
Revised 27 October 2022
Accepted 29 November 2022
Available online 02 December 2022
Emotion word competency is a key component of emotional intelligence, specifically, the ability to monitor
one's own and others' emotions, to differentiate between different emotions, and to use emotional
information to guide one's behavior and thinking. However, the majority of research on emotion words has
been conducted with monolingual participants. While emotion word development of monolinguals is well
documented, research to date shows no clear-cut answers to the question whether bilinguals, especially,
heritage-bilingual children, share the same characteristics on emotion word development with monolinguals.
By observing two Chinese inherited language children living in the United States in CLAN corpus, this paper
will explore the output of Chinese affective words of bilingual children, in an attempt to compare and explain
the similarities and differences between bilingual children and monolingual children in their vocabulary
output during the period of two-word stage and the Telegraphic Speech.
KEYWORDS
emotional intelligence, monolingual, bilinguals, Telegraphic Speech
1. INTRODUCTION
Words like angry, happy, or worry describing emotional states, moods, or
feelings are defined as emotion words (Vigliocco et al., 2009). It was
proven that emotion word competency is fundamental in interpersonal
relationships and social communication (Ahn and Chang, 2021). On the
one hand, emotion word competency is a key component of emotional
intelligence, specifically, the ability to monitor one's own and others'
emotions, to differentiate between different emotions, and to use
emotional information to guide one's behavior and thinking (Colman,
2015). On the other hand, despite being a personal and internal process,
emotion is largely shaped by social norms in its perception and expression,
thus a person's level of emotion word competency may indicate more than
just their general vocabulary in a language, but also how well accustomed
they are to a culture associated with that language. In light of this, the
development of emotion words has therefore attracted the attention of
many scholars.
1.1 Literature Review
The majority of research on emotion words has been conducted with
monolingual participants. For example, it was illustrated in a study that
the early use of basic emotion terms by English-monolingual children
began in the second year and exploded in the third year (Bretherton and
Beeghly, 1982). Furthermore, another study pointed out that as a child
grows up, the emotional vocabulary doubles every two years, but then
flattens out as he or she reaches adulthood, and the processing of positive
emotion words is superior to negative emotion words. (Baron-Cohen et al.,
2010). In addition, a significant age effect has been found on the Mandarin
Chinese emotion lexicon with a dramatic increase from age six to eight
years (Li and Yu, 2015).
However, with the increase in global immigration in recent years, more
and more people become multilingual and need to deal regularly with
multiple cultures. For instance, as cited in, by 2050, the number of Asian
immigrants to the US, including their US-born children, is expected to
reach 40.6 million (Ahn and Chang, 2021; US Census Bureau 2008).
Therefore, scholars raised the question about whether the processing of
emotion words has the same characteristics in bilinguals as it is in
monolinguals, especially, when it comes to children born into immigrant
families, who are exposed to two languages. Ferré et al. illustrated in a
study that, for bilinguals, the languages acquired in childhood have strong
emotional resonances due to the rich emotional context in which they are
learned (Ferré et al., 2018).
1.2 Research Gap
While emotion word development of monolinguals is well documented,
research to date shows no clear-cut answers to the question whether
bilinguals, especially, heritage-bilingual children, share the same
characteristics on emotion word development with monolinguals.
1.3 Research Questions
In light of the above, our study focused on the emotion word development
of Chinese-heritage Children born in the United States, with three
questions involved as the fallowing:
1) For Chinese-heritage early bilinguals, when do their emotion words
in both languages start developing?
2) Compared to both Chinese and English monolingual children, is there
any difference?
3) Is there still positive emotion word superiority as in monolingual
children?
2. METHOD
2.1 Materials
2.1.1 Corpus Selection
In order to answer the first question, we selected two bilingual corpora on
World Languages, Literature and Cultural Studies (WLLCS) 2(1) (2023) 01-03
Cite The A rticle: C hang Yuro u (2023).
Emoti on Word D evelopme nt of Chi nese-Heritag e Children in the
Us: A Case Stu dy of Lun a and Avi a.
World Languag es, Litera ture an d Cultur al Studie s, 2(1): 01-03
.
CHILDES: Luna from age two to four and Avia from age two to three, and
both of whom during the study period were mainly exposed to Chinese at
home and English and Chinese at daycares. To further illustrate the last
two questions, we also chose other two monolingual corpora, a Chinese
monolingual (CM) corpus of Xue’er and another English monolingual (EM)
of Adam as a comparison to the bilingual corpora.
2.2 Procedure
To illustrate the starting time of their emotion word development, we
need to know the time when they first produce an emotion word.
Considering there is no such a command in CHILDES to help us extract
related data, what we need to do first is to make a list consisting of the
most frequent emotion words in two languages so that we can use kwal
command to extract the data we need. However, there is a large quantity
of emotion words in both Chinese and English lexicon. Because of the
limited time, it is almost impossible for us to check every emotion word,
therefore, with reference of two other studies of about emotion words, we
conducted a word list as showed in Appendix1 (Zhong and Qian, 2005; Lin
and Yao, 2016). We then used kwal command to check every emotion word
on that list in the selected four corpora and the extracted data is shown in
the Appendix2.
3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
3.1 Results
After comparison and analysis, the previous three questions will be
answered in this part.
For bilingual children, there is an age gap between the first creation of
emotional vocabulary in Chinese and English, as seen in Figure 1. Avia and
Luna established their Chinese emotion words significantly earlier than
English emotion words attributed to the effect of Mandarin in the early
family environment (as we already mentioned the backgrounds of two
heritage children). Luna produced her first emotion word “乐” in Chinese
at the age of 2 years 2 months (at same time Chinese monolingual Xue'er
produced her first emotion word “怕” at the age of 1.5) but did not produce
her first English emotion word until she was 4 years old. Two years after
she produced her first Chinese emotion word. As for English monolingual
Adam, he produced his first emotion word at the age of 2. For Avia, she did
not even produce any English emotion word in this corpus. However, one
thing needs to be noted is that Avia's corpus only records her discourse
from 2 to 3 years old. Therefore, the output of Avia's lack of English
emotional words is related to the fact that the corpus is not recorded.
Beside the age gap, there is still a quantity gap between their Chinese
emotion words and English emotion words, with the quantity of Chinese
emotion words much larger.
Though compared to their English emotion word development, Chinese is
more dominant for Luna and Avia. However, compared to Chinese
monolingual child——Xue’er, we found out that the diversity of Chinese
emotion words produced by Luna and Avia is more limited. As in the
appendix 2, Luna used the negation form of "不+ root" to express feelings
like “不开心” for sadness, while Xue’er can use different words to describe
sadness such as “伤心”,“难过” . The case is the same comparing Luna’s
English emotion word development with English bilingual, Adam. From
this perspective of diversity, we could draw the conclusion that the
development of emotion words of monolingual children is better than that
of bilingual children from the age of two to four. However, this may be
related to the input they received, which will be further explained in
discussion.
Figure 1: Age of First Emotion Word Production
Figure 2: Valence of Emotion Words
Regarding the third question, as showed in Figure 2, there is no obvious
positive superiority in both bilingual children and monolingual children’s
production. Overall, they produced even more negative emotion words,
such as Avia, whose negative words output was three times more than that
of positive words. And this case was also shown in the corpus of Xue’er,
whose negative emotion word output is more than positive output. Thus,
World Languages, Literature and Cultural Studies (WLLCS) 2(1) (2023) 01-03
Cite The A rticle: C hang Yuro u (2023).
Emoti on Word D evelopme nt of Chi nese-Heritag e Children in the
Us: A Case Stu dy of Lun a and Avi a.
World Languag es, Litera ture an d Cultur al Studie s, 2(1): 01-03
.
no positive superiority has been found in this study.
3.2 Discussion
There are some arguments pointing out that instead of emotion words,
children often begin to express their emotions by crying when they cannot
speak, right after birth when they are hungry, sleepy, or in pain. When it
comes to babbling stage, children will use "noun + noun" to express
feelings and moods, such as “饿饿” (hungry) and “觉觉” (sleepy). The
above arguments are true but now that we have evidence that children
learn the use of emotion words before they learn to use copulas, in another
word, children learn how to express their feelings in verbal vocabulary at
the early two-word (or telegraph). For instance:
I happy. (Brown/Adam/021113)
He happy. (Brown/Adam/030011)
Besides, regarding the definition of vocabulary or phrase collocation, we
also regard such words “不高兴” as negative words, so homophones, such
as willing and like in English were excluded in this study. And the words
expressing other intentions rather than emotions were deleted in this
study as well. For example, Xue’er produced “快乐”when she was 1 year
and 10 months old, but actually she was saying “生日快乐”（happy
birthday）at that time, thus “快乐” in this case is not an emotion word.
Meanwhile, we added the search of the preceding and following sentences
in the retrieval instruction to rule out the target vocabulary produced by
children, in case it is imitation affected by the input of adults. We then
recorded the earliest age at which the child spontaneously produced the
word. Finally, we will count how often the child produces the word. All
above can also help us to know the earliest emotion words produced by
bilingual children in English and Chinese, which are positive word “乐”and
negative word “生气”in Chinese and positive word “love” and negative
word “hate” in English.
As for frequency, we can have a general watching, that is, in the list of high-
frequency emotional words of adults, which words will children choose as
"emotional words frequently used by children"? Based on our data at the
moment, the Chinese positive words frequently used by children are "乐",
"快乐" and "高兴" (the output frequencies of the four children are: 10, 7
and 18 respectively); Chinese negative words are "生气", "害怕" and "怕"
(the output frequencies of the four children are: 18, 20 and 19
respectively). The English positive words frequently used by children are
"happy" and "love" (the output frequencies of the four children are: 44 and
61 respectively); the English negative words frequently used by children
are "angry" and "hate" (The combined output frequencies of the four
children are: 6 and 5). So further studies can collect more corpora of
children to get a vocabulary of high-frequency emotional words of
children.
Lastly, to explore the relationship between parents’ input and children’s
output of emotion words, we also extracted data from MOT tier and it
showed that：
Firstly, parents’ input to their children is biased towards narrative (or
third-person descriptive) emotional words. For example, when Xue’er’s
mother tells her fairy tales, she will input emotion words in such situation
(*MOT: 小老虎毛毛看了很高兴. (Zhou3/000227)). But when the child is
producing, in addition to using emotion words to describe the state or
emotions of others when telling stories, they have also used emotional
words to express their own state, emotion, and mood (*CHI: 我们真高兴.
(Zhou3/ 000610)).
Secondly, the types of emotion words input from parents and observers in
the corpus are less than the output produced by the children themselves,
regardless of positive words or negative words. The positive words
produced by Xue’er have 6 different types of positive words and 5 of
negative words. After searching one by one, Xue’er's mother only
produced 4 positive words “高兴”, “幸福”, “乐” and “开心”, and 3 kinds of
negative vocabulary, which are “生气”, “难过” and “害怕”. Here we do not
discuss whether children have increased the types of negative words
because they have learned the use of “不”, but regard “不高兴”、“不开心”,
etc. as an independent and holistic way of vocabulary to express emotions
or feelings.
Thirdly, although the mother has produced a negative word “怕” in the
corpus (*MOT：怎么，你怕蜘蛛网吗 (CHCC/Avia/Mandarin/021101)),
but obviously, due to the influence of another language—English, Avia did
not produce “怕” on her own, but used the combination of “no+positive”
vocabulary that she has learned to express negative emotional meaning,
such as:
*CHI：大山不高兴啦！（CHCC/Avia/Mandarin/020118）；
*CHI：只是阿姨不开心我们进去啊.（CHCC/Avia/Mandarin/021101）
LIMITATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Due to the urgency of time, we were not able to compare more corpora so
fail to get a large quantity of data. Thus, the phenomenon obtained cannot
be regarded as a general conclusion. Moreover, the word list we used
might fail to include all the high frequency emotion words, so further
studies are encouraged to include more words and more corpora in order
to gain a complete picture.
REFERENCES
Ahn, S., and Chang, C.B., 2021. Emotion Word Development in Bilingual
Children Living in Majority and Minority Contexts. Applied
linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amab071
Baron-Cohen, S., Golan, O., Wheelwright, S., Granader, Y., and Hill, J., 2010.
Emotion word comprehension from 4 to 16 years old: a
developmental survey. Frontiers in evolutionary neuroscience, 2,
Pp. 109.
Bretherton, I., and Beeghly, M., 1982. Talking about internal states: The
acquisition of an explicit theory of mind. Developmental psychology,
18 (6), Pp. 906.
Colman, A.M., 2015. A dictionary of psychology. Oxford University Press,
USA.
Ferré, P., Anglada-Tort, M., and Guasch, M., 2018. Processing of emotional
words in bilinguals: Testing the effects of word concreteness, task
type and language status. Second Language Research, 34 (3), Pp.
371-394.
Jie, Z., and Mingyi, Q., 2005. Development, reliability, and validity of the
Chinese emotional adjective test scale. Chinese Journal of Clinical
Psychology, 13 (1), Pp. 9-13.
Li, Y., and Yu, D., 2015. Development of emotion word comprehension in
Chinese children from 2 to 13 years old: Relationships with valence
and empathy. PloS one, 10 (12), Pp. e0143712.
Lin, J., and Yao, Y., 2016. Encoding emotion in Chinese: a database of
Chinese emotion words with information of emotion type, intensity,
and valence. Lingua Sinica, 2 (1), Pp. 1-22.
Vigliocco, G., Meteyard, L., Andrews, M., and Kousta, S., 2009. Toward a
theory of semantic representation. Language and Cognition, 1 (2),
Pp. 219-247.
