Language and the Many Faces of Emotion

Abstract

From the early parental diaries of the 1920s to recent studies of the neural bases of language using functional brain imaging, enormous progress has been made in our understanding of the language acquisition process both across languages and cultures, as well as in typical and atypically developing children. However, language does not develop in a vacuum. Not only are there basic neural and social requirements for language to be acquired, but every utterance is produced and interpreted in an emotional context. As adults we consider our primary communicative system to be language, but we use emotional cues to help interpret utterances; and in producing speech, we exploit emotional expression to enhance, supplement or even, in the case of sarcasm or irony, to contradict the content of our messages. Moreover, we can convey this emotional colouring paralinguistically using intonation, voice quality or facial expression; or we can shade our utterances lexically using emotion words. Developmentally, long before children ever utter their first words, they are already competent affective communicators. The onset of productive language at about 12 months represents a developmental challenge for the child: how to integrate these two communicative systems. In this chapter, we will look at the intersection of language and emotion and their development in four different contexts drawing on 20 years of research.