engleski

Children's talk about emotions: Preliminary data on a Croatian sample

Introduction: Mental state talk can be typically divided into words that refer to desires, cognitive states and emotional states. The onset of emotion language is around 18 to 20 months of age and rapid increase of emotion terms use appears during the third year (Bretherton et al., 1986). Bretherton et al. (1981) showed that by 20 months children produce labels for a variety of physiological and emotional states in appropriate contexts. Research has also shown that by 28 months the majority of children use at least some emotion labels (Beeghly, 1982). Positive emotion terms produced by 28-month-olds referred to happiness, amusement, affection, pride, surprise, moral conformity and general well-being. Negative terms referred to sadness, fear, anger, disgust, guilt, and negative feelings in general. The objectives of this study were to examine the onset of emotion language and early emotion vocabulary in Croatian children, as well as the frequency of reference to various emotions in children’ s talk, as a first step in research of mental state language in Croatian. Method: The study was based on speech utterances from three Croatian children, aged 10, 6 to 39 months, collected in the CHILDES database (McWhinney, 2000 ; Kovačević, 2003). Two independent coders analyzed 36809 speech utterances in order to define linguistic means and terms children use for referring to mental states in Croatian. The percentage of agreement regarding these references between the coders was 89, 3% and 4218 references for which the coders agreed they represented reference to mental state and/or mental state term were included in the final analysis. Results: A total of 16 different expressions for emotions were identified (verbs, adjectives and phrases). Among these expressions, 11 referred to positive (happiness, love and affection), and 5 to negative emotions (sadness, anger and fear). The expressions were coded as references to primary or secondary emotions and as references to internal states or expressive behavior. There were a total of 133 uses of these expressions, which comprised 3, 2% of all the references to mental states. Children’ s first reference to emotions appeared at 18 months. The majority of uses of these terms referred to expressive behavior and primary emotions, and a somewhat smaller number to secondary emotions and internal states. Conclusion: Our data present good starting point for further research on emotion language acquisition in Croatian in the context of cross-linguistic research on mental state talk and universality of theory of mind development.

theory of mind; language; emotions

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