Emotional Information Affects Eye Movements Of 4-5 Year Old Children's During Spoken Language Comprehension

This study used the visual paradigm to examine the effects of emotional rhythm and semantic emotions on the speech comprehension of 4-5 year old children when they watched different types of emotional images.The first Experiment examined the influence of emotional information on verbal comprehension of children under emotional faces.The visual channel presented three types of emotional faces(happy,sad,and neutral)from the same female,and the auditory channel presented a sentence with consistent or inconsistent phonological and prosodic moods(positive positive speech semantics,positive speech semantics Negative,negative phonetic semantics,and negative phonetic semantics).Visual channel information and auditory channel information presented simultaneously.We asked children to find pictures in the visual image that are consistent with the speaker's emotions,and always looked at the selected emotional picture.The second Experiment examined the influence of two kinds of emotional information on the speech comprehension of children under the expression of cartoon emotions.In the experiment,the emotional picture presented by the visual channel is to draw three emotional expressions on the picture of fruits and vegetables(eg,strawberry,tomato,etc.).The sentence information of the auditory channel is consistent with the first experiment.Similarly,children are required to look to represent Picture of the emotional state of the speaker.The first fixation time,fixation time,fixation counts,vist time,and total visit time were recorded using the Tobii X120.The experimental results show that:(1)The main effects of speech emotion appear in the two indicators of the visit time in the first experiment and the fixation count in the second experiment,which shows that speech emotion affects children's speech comprehension,but it does not affect the early processing of speech comprehension;(2)The main effects of semantic mood were not found in both experiments,but there were significant semantic emotions and picture interactions on all indicators.This shows that semantic emotions affect the children's viewing of facial expressions;When the two emotional messages conflicted,the children depended on semantic emotional information when judging the speaker's emotions.(3)In the second experiment,the emotional picture main effect appeared on the fixation time and the vist time,but it did not appear in the first experiment.This shows that children's attention processing ability when recognizing cartoon emotion picture is better than that of face emotion picture.Especially,the processing of sad cartoon emotion pictures takes up more cognitive resources;(4)Comparing Experiment 1 and Experiment 2,we found that when watching different kinds of emotional pictures,the attention of young children to emotional rythm is different.Under a real emotional face,young children pay more attention to sad speech;under the cartoon emotional face,Young children are more concerned with positive speech.