Word learning is a crucial aspect of early social and cognitive development, and previous research indicates that children's word learning is influenced by the context in which the word is spoken. However, the role of emotions as contextual cues to word learning remains less clear. This study investigated word learning among 2.5-year-old children in angry, happy, sad, and variable emotional contexts. Fifty-six children (30 female; mean age = 2.49 years) participated in a novel noun generalization task in which children observed an experimenter labelling objects in either a consistently angry, consistently happy, consistently sad, or variable (one exemplar per emotion) context. The children were then asked to identify the label–object association. The results revealed that children's performance was above chance levels for all four conditions (all t's > 3.68, all p's < .01), but performance did not significantly differ by condition (F[3,52] = 0.51, p = .677). These results provide valuable information regarding potential boundaries for when contextual information may versus may not influence children's word learning.

中文翻译：

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幼儿单词学习对情绪环境的变化具有鲁棒性

单词学习是早期社会和认知发展的一个重要方面，之前的研究表明，儿童的单词学习受到单词所说的上下文的影响。然而，情绪作为语境线索对单词学习的作用仍然不太清楚。本研究调查了 2.5 岁儿童在愤怒、快乐、悲伤和多变的情绪环境中的单词学习。56 名儿童（30 名女性；平均年龄 = 2.49 岁）参与了一项新颖的名词概括任务，在该任务中，孩子们观察到实验者在持续生气、持续快乐、持续悲伤或多变（每种情绪一个示例）上下文中标记对象. 然后要求孩子们识别标签-对象关联。结果表明，儿童t > 3.68，所有p < .01)，但性能在不同条件下没有显着差异 ( F [3,52] = 0.51, p  = .677)。这些结果提供了有关上下文信息可能与可能不影响儿童单词学习的潜在界限的有价值信息。