Preschoolers’ real-time coordination of vocal and facial emotional information

An eye-tracking methodology was used to examine the time course of 3- and 5-year-olds' ability to link speech bearing different acoustic cues to emotion (i.e., happy-sounding, neutral, and sad-sounding intonation) to photographs of faces reflecting different emotional expressions. Analyses of saccadic eye movement patterns indicated that, for both 3- and 5-year-olds, sad-sounding speech triggered gaze shifts to a matching (sad-looking) face from...