Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cognit Original Articles Sensitivity to emotion information in children’s lexical processing Tatiana C. Lund, David M. Sidhu, Penny M. Pexman ⁎ University of Calgary, Canada ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Emotion Word valence Lexical processing Affective embodiment Auditory lexical decision Concreteness ABSTRACT We tested predictions of multiple representation accounts of conceptual processing, including the proposal that emotion information may provide a bootstrapping mechanism for vocabulary acquisition. We investigated the influence of word valence on children’s lexical processing, presenting 40 positive words, 40 neutral words, and 40 negative words in an auditory lexical decision task (ALDT), along with 120 nonwords. We tested 99 children across three age groups: 5, 6, or 7 years. There were no significant effects of valence on the ALDT responses of 5- year-old children. The 6-year-old children, however, were faster to respond to negative words than to neutral words and, for more abstract words, faster to respond to positive words than to neutral words. The 7-year-old children were faster for positive words than for neutral words, regardless of concreteness. As such, children showed sensitivity to word valence in lexical processing, at a younger age than had been established in previous research. In addition, children’s language skills were related to their improved processing of more abstract neutral words between 6 and 7 years of age. These results are consistent with multimodal accounts of word meaning and lexical development. 1. Introduction According to several recent proposals, conceptual knowledge is acquired and represented in multimodal systems (Barsalou, Santos, Simmons, & Wilson, 2008; Borghi et al., 2017; Dove, 2011, 2018; Thill & Twomey, 2016). That is, word meanings are represented in sensory, motor, emotion, and language systems, and different systems are rela- tively more important for the representation of different kinds of con- cepts. These multiple representation views stand in contrast to tradi- tional views which assumed a single system of representation; for instance, that word knowledge is represented in symbolic, amodal format (e.g., Collins & Loftus, 1975) or, alternatively, could be re- presented in the statistical relationships between words, as captured in lexical co-occurrence (e.g., Lund & Burgess, 1996). The multiple re- presentation views also stand in contrast to strongly embodied ac- counts, by which it is assumed that all word meanings are grounded in sensorimotor and emotion systems (e.g., Glenberg, 2015; Glenberg & Gallese, 2012). The multimodal accounts are supported by the results of recent studies with adults, which have shown that responses in simple lexical tasks are influenced by variables that capture the extent to which lin- guistic, sensory, motor, and/or emotion information is associated with word referents (Moffat, Siakaluk, Sidhu, & Pexman, 2015; Yap, Pexman, Wellsby, Hargreaves, & Huff, 2012). For instance, Yap and Seow (2014; also Kousta, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2009; Vinson, Ponari, & Vigliocco, 2014) showed that adult participants’ responses in a visual lexical de- cision task (LDT; is the letter string a real word?) were affected by word valence, with faster responses for words with positive or negative meanings than for words with neutral meanings. One explanation for facilitatory effects of emotion information is that the emotion in- formation associated with valenced words affords richer semantic re- presentations and thus speeds lexical decisions (Pexman, 2012; Siakaluk et al., 2016). Some adult studies have shown a somewhat different pattern of valence effects. For instance, in a large-scale analysis of adult LDT re- sponses Kuperman, Estes, Brysbaert, and Warriner (2014) found that responses were fastest to positive words and slowest to negative words, with responses to neutral words falling in between (see also Estes & Adelman, 2008). Although somewhat different to that described above, this pattern still demonstrates sensitivity to emotion information in lexical processing, and has been taken as evidence for automatic vigi- lance to negative stimuli (Pratto & John, 1991). There is speculation that the particular pattern of valence effects observed in adult studies may depend on stimulus list, small effect sizes, frequency confounds, and other factors that are not yet understood (Kuperman, 2015). As highlighted in a handful of recent reviews (Marshall, 2016; Pexman, 2018; Wellsby & Pexman, 2014), embodied and multimodal accounts both raise interesting questions about development of word https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.04.017 Received 27 June 2018; Received in revised form 10 January 2019; Accepted 17 April 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta T2N1N4, Canada. E-mail address: pexman@ucalgary.ca (P.M. Pexman). Cognition 190 (2019) 61–71 0010-0277/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. T