Children's affective involvement in early word learning

The current study set out to examine physiological arousal and the emotional response associated with word learning success in young three-year-old predominantly white children. In particular, we examined whether children’s physiological arousal during a word learning task predicts their word learning success and whether successful learning predicts children’s subsequent positive emotions that may be triggered by their success at the task. We presented children (n = 50) with a cross-situational word learning task and measured their pupillary arousal during and following completion of the task, as well as changes to their upper body posture following completion of the task, as indices of children’s emotions during and following task completion. Children who showed greater physiological arousal during the novel word recognition task (n=40) showed improved subsequent word recognition performance. We found that children showed more elevated posture after completing a familiar word learning task compared to completing a novel word learning task (n=33) but results on children’s individual learning success and postural elevation were mixed. We discuss the findings with regards to children’s affective involvement in word learning.