The role of emotion in acquisition of verb meaning

Abstract

Children's earliest acquired words are often learned through sensorimotor experience, but it is less clear how children learn the meaning of concepts whose referents are less associated with sensorimotor experience. The Affective Embodiment Account postulates that children use emotional experience to learn more abstract word meanings. There is mixed evidence for this account; analyses using mega-study datasets suggest that negative or positively valenced abstract words are learned earlier than emotionally neutral abstract words, yet the relationship between sensorimotor experience and valence is inconsistent across different methods of operationalising sensorimotor experience. In the present study, we tested the Affective Embodiment Account specifically in the context of verb acquisition. We tested two semantic dimensions of sensorimotor experience: concreteness and embodiment ratings. Our analyses showed that more positive and negative abstract verbs are acquired at an earlier age than neutral abstract verbs, consistent with the Affective Embodiment Account. When sensorimotor experience is operationalised as embodiment, high embodiment verbs are acquired at an earlier age than low embodiment verbs, and there is further benefit for high embodiment and positively valenced verbs. The findings further clarify the role of Affective Embodiment as a mechanism of language acquisition.

Keywords: Lexical semantics; age of acquisition; valence; vocabulary development.