Developmental changes in understanding emotion in speech in children in Japan and the United States

The present study investigated how 91 3- and 5-year-old children in Japan and the United States (U.S.) attended to lexical cues (i.e., what is said) and paralinguistic cues (i.e., how it is said) when inferring emotion from speech, as well as the cognitive mechanisms potentially underlying attention to such cues. Japanese children were less likely to be influenced by lexical cues than U. S. children when inferring emotion from speech with conflicting lexical and paralinguistic cues. Moreover, executive function and theory of mind were related to a reduced reliance on lexical cues for Japanese children, while such relationships were negligible for U.S. children. Such crosscultural differences in emotional processing may arise from differences in cultural demands to attend to paralinguistic cues.