Effects of Emotional Valence and Concreteness on Children's Recognition Memory

Abstract

There are considerable gaps in our knowledge of how children develop abstract language. In this paper, we tested the Affective Embodiment Account, which proposes that emotional information is more essential for abstract than concrete conceptual development. We tested the recognition memory of 7- and 8-year-old children, as well as a group of adults, for abstract and concrete words which differed categorically in valence (negative, neutral, and positive). Word valence significantly interacted with concreteness in hit rates of both children and adults, such that effects of valence were only found in memory for abstract words. The pattern of valence effects differed for children and adults: children remembered negative words more accurately than neutral and positive words (a negativity effect), whereas adults remembered negative and positive words more accurately than neutral words (a negativity effect and a positivity effect). In addition, signal detection analysis revealed that children were better able to discriminate negative than positive words, regardless of concreteness. The findings suggest that the memory accuracy of 7- and 8-year-old children is influenced by emotional information, particularly for abstract words. The results are in agreement with the Affective Embodiment Account and with multimodal accounts of children's lexical development.

Keywords: affective embodiment; concreteness; lexical knowledge; recognition memory; word valence.

FIGURE 1

Children’s and adults’ hit rates, false alarm rates, d’ scores, and Criterion C values for words as a function of valence and concreteness. Horizontal bars indicate medians; diamonds indicate means. Colored boxes correspond to the range between the first and third quartiles (i.e., the 25th and 75th percentiles). Whiskers indicate the lowest and highest values up to 1.5 times the interquartile range from the first and third quartiles, respectively. Dots represent all other values beyond the whiskers.