Development in Children’s Interpretation of Pitch Cues to Emotions

Young infants respond to positive and negative speech prosody (A. Fernald, 1993 ), yet 4‐year‐olds rely on lexical information when it conflicts with paralinguistic cues to approval or disapproval (M. Friend, 2003 ). This article explores this surprising phenomenon, testing one hundred eighteen 2‐ to 5‐year‐olds’ use of isolated pitch cues to emotions in interactive tasks. Only 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds consistently interpreted exaggerated,...