| 總結: | <p>The overarching aim of my thesis is to examine emotion language in children’s reading and writing, and the learning of new emotion words by adults and children. Understanding emotion words is crucial for emotional concept development, but few studies have considered emotion words beyond early childhood, or in the context of written language. This is an important gap as children experience language through reading emotional narratives, and this brings opportunities to learn new words and abstract concepts. Little is known about the potential influence that the emotional valence of the text might have on word learning. The thesis addresses these gaps in the literature through a combination of data-driven corpus analyses and experimental work.</p>
<p>Chapter 1 introduces the broad topics of language and emotion, and the scope of the thesis. Three sets of data-driven corpus analyses (Chapters 2,3, and 5) examine the frequency and distribution of emotion words in texts written by and for children, as well as the emotional valence associated with these words. Chapter 2 reports cross-corpus comparisons showing that language written by and for older children contained a greater diversity of emotion words than those written by and for younger children. After controlling for age, even books targeted at pre-schoolers for shared reading contained more unique emotion words than both child-directed speech and television language. In Chapter 3, sentiment analyses across a large sample of children’s writing revealed that positive sentiments in children’s writing decreased with age. The stories were analysed further in Chapter 5, where there was a positive correlation between word valence and context valence, a pattern that was consistent across ages.</p>
<p>To complement the corpus approach, this thesis also includes two word-learning experiments, one with adults (Chapter 4) and one with children (Chapter 5). Participants read novel adjectives in short narratives that had either neutral, negative, or positive valence. Adults and children were able to infer the valence of the novel words from reading, and those words read in either positive or negative contexts were learned better than those words read in the neutral context. Chapter 6 integrates multiple approaches to explore how children’s experience with reading and written language is related to the emotional content of the language they produce. Preliminary analyses revealed that reading experience was a significant predictor of the lexical diversity of their overall narrative production, but not for the production of emotion words specifically, despite the positive correlation between reading experience and emotion word production. Chapter 7 closes with a general discussion that offers reflections and suggestions for future research.</p>
<p>Together, my thesis combines both data-driven analyses and experimental work to better understand the emotional content in children’s written language and how emotional contexts influence word learning. The research addresses a knowledge gap in written language and emotion, which holds implications for language and literacy development, emotional well-being, and educational practice.</p>
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