Emotion Understanding in Bilingual Preschoolers

The effects of bilingualism on child development have been extensively examined in last decades. Research reveals that simultaneous use of two or more languages affects child's language development, cognitive and social skills. The current study focuses on the so-far understudied theory of emot...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Behavioral sciences 2022-04, Vol.12 (4), p.115
Main Authors: Bukhalenkova, Daria, Veraksa, Aleksander, Gavrilova, Margarita, Kartushina, Natalia
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bilingualism
Child development
Children & youth
Cognitive development
Comprehension
Cultural differences
culture
emotion understanding
Emotions
Knowledge
Language
Language acquisition
Language thought relationship
Lexical semantics
Minority & ethnic groups
Monolingualism
non-verbal intelligence
Parents & parenting
Preschool children
Russian language
Social interaction
Values
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Summary:The effects of bilingualism on child development have been extensively examined in last decades. Research reveals that simultaneous use of two or more languages affects child's language development, cognitive and social skills. The current study focuses on the so-far understudied theory of emotion understanding in bilingual children. A cohort of 593 bilingual and monolingual 5-6-year-olds took the Russian version of the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) that assesses three components of emotion understanding: emotion understanding of external causes of emotions, reflective causes of emotions; and mental causes of emotions. Our results revealed no group differences between overall emotion understanding and understanding of external and reflective causes of emotions. However, monolingual children had a slightly better understanding of mental causes of emotions compared to bilingual children, when controlling for age, gender, and non-verbal intelligence. These results suggest that children growing up in bilingual environments might require more time and/or language/culture exposure to master the ability to understand mental causes of emotions, taking into account cultural differences, as well as the semantic and lexical differences in emotion labelling and emotion expression in each language.
ISSN:2076-328X
2076-328X
DOI:10.3390/bs12040115