Emotion Understanding in Bilingual Preschoolers

Abstract

The effects of bilingualism on child development have been extensively examined for the last ten years, due, among other reasons, to the increasing mobility of today’s world. Research indicates that the simultaneous use of two or more languages has a qualitative impact on child’s language development, cognitive and social skills. The current study focuses on the so-far understudied theory of emotion understanding in bilingual children. A cohort of 593 bilingual and monolingual 5–6-year-olds took the Russian version of the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) that assesses three components of emotion understanding: emotion understanding of external causes of emotions; reflective causes of emotions; and mental causes of emotions. Our results revealed no group differences between overall emotion understanding and the understanding of external and reflective causes of emotions. However, monolingual children had a slightly better understanding of mental causes of emotions compared to bilinguals, when controlling for age, gender, and non-verbal intelligence. These results suggest that children growing up in bilingual environments might require more time and/or language/culture exposure to master the ability to understand mental causes of emotions, taking into account cultural differences, as well as the semantic and lexical differences in emotion labelling and expression in each language.