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Emotional state talk and emotion understanding: a training study with preschool children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

ILARIA GRAZZANI  and
VERONICA ORNAGHI
ILARIA GRAZZANI*
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Faculty of Educational Sciences, Department of Human Sciences ‘R. Massa’, Milan, Italy
VERONICA ORNAGHI
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Faculty of Educational Sciences, Department of Human Sciences ‘R. Massa’, Milan, Italy
*
Address for correspondence: Prof Ilaria Grazzani, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Piazza Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126, Building U6, 4th floor, Milan, Italy. e-mail: ilaria.grazzani@unimib.it
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Abstract

The present study investigates whether training preschool children in the active use of emotional state talk plays a significant role in bringing about greater understanding of emotion terms and improved emotion comprehension. Participants were 100 preschool children (M=52 months; SD=9·9; range: 35–70 months), randomly assigned to experimental or control conditions. They were pre- and post-tested to assess their language comprehension, metacognitive language comprehension and emotion understanding. Analyses of pre-test data did not show any significant differences between experimental and control groups. During the intervention phase, the children were read stories enriched with emotional lexicon. After listening to the stories, children in the experimental group took part in conversational language games designed to stimulate use of the selected emotional terms. In contrast, the control group children did not take part in any special linguistic activities after the story readings. Analyses revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the understanding of inner state language and in the comprehension of emotion.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 5 , November 2011 , pp. 1124 - 1139
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

[*]

This study was part-funded by a doctoral research grant from Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy. We wish to thank all children who participated in the study, Dr Carlo di Chiacchio for his help with the statistical analysis, and Dr Clare O'Sullivan for the linguistic revision of the article. Our particular thanks also go to Professor Keith Oatley, who read the first draft of the article and gave us valuable feedback. Finally, we are also most grateful to the anonymous referees for encouraging us to interpret our findings more carefully and critically.

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