Abstract Despite the evidence that infants are sensitive to facial cues and prosody for the detection of emotion, we have contradictory evidence regarding the use of these cues by older preschool and school children when inferring both emotional and politeness stance. This study assessed preschool aged children’s sensitivity to intonational and facial cues signalling a speaker’s polite stance in requestive speech acts with controlled lexical and contextual materials. Thirty-six 3-year-old American English-speaking children performed a forced-choice decision task which investigated whether children at this age use pitch and/or facial cues to infer a speaker’s affective stance in either audio-only, visual-only or audio-visual presentation modalities, when lexical cues are controlled for. Results showed that (a) children at three years can infer a speaker’s polite stance equally well in all three conditions (audio-only, visual-only and audio-visual) and thereby (b) unlike previous research, in the present task both intonation and facial cues are equally strong cues in children’s understanding of a speaker’s polite stance in requestive speech acts. The authors discuss especially the implications of this early use of intonation to detect politeness, relating it to other previous research on children’s ability to infer meaning from pitch.

中文翻译：

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三岁儿童从语调和面部暗示推断出礼貌的态度

摘要尽管有证据表明婴儿对面部表情和韵律对情绪的检测很敏感，但对于年龄较大的学龄前儿童和学龄儿童在推断情绪和礼貌态度时使用这些线索，我们有相反的证据。这项研究评估了学龄前儿童对民族和面部暗示的敏感度，这些线索表明了在受控的词汇和语境材料的要求下的言语行为中说话者的礼貌态度。三十六名三岁的美国英语儿童执行了一项强制选择决定任务，该任务调查了这个年龄段的儿童是否使用音高和/或面部提示来以仅音频，仅视觉或仅声音的方式推断出说话者的情感立场。当控制词汇提示时的视听演示形式。结果表明：（a）3岁的孩子可以在所有三个条件下（仅音频，仅视觉和视听）同样很好地推断出说话者的礼貌态度，因此（b）与以前的研究不同，在本任务中，语调在儿童要求性的言语行为中，面部表情和线索同样是儿童理解说话者的礼貌姿态的有力线索。作者特别讨论了这种早期使用语调来检测礼貌的含义，并将其与其他先前有关儿童从音调推断含义的能力的研究相关联。