The effects of prosody and referent characteristics on novel noun learning in children

Prosody is how words are spoken, often affecting the messages we convey. When prosody is relevant to the meaning, word learning is enhanced; however, it is unknown whether children attend to prosody that is not relevant to a word learning task (e.g., fearful for no reason). Previous research with adult noun learning showed that some emotional prosodies (e.g., warning) decreased word learning in comparison with a neutral Name prosody, demonstrating adults’ inability to ignore this irrelevant information. Given preschool children’s developing abilities to use prosody, the current research examined the effect of emotional prosody on children’s novel noun learning. In this study, preschool children (N = 67) were trained on novel labels paired to novel referents across five prosodic categories. Results suggest that referent complexity, animacy status, and prosody affect children’s noun learning, but in a different way than they affect adults. Prosody affected learning labels only for simple inanimate referents, with Happy and Fear prosodies being more accurate than the neutral Name. Whereas adults in previous research have been seemingly distracted by emotional prosody in learning nouns, children’s novel noun learning for simple objects was enhanced by Happy and Fear prosodies. This demonstrates the potential benefits that emotional prosody may have on children’s word learning.