유아의 어휘에서 긍부정 분포 정도와 어휘 발달의 관계에 관한 연구

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of children's emotional valence on their language development among various factors affecting language development in children. Specifically, the study examined how positive words impact language development outcomes. Previous research has identified several factors that positively influence early vocabulary acquisition in children, including the quantity of child-directed speech from parents (Seidl & Johnson, 2006; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013), rich and diverse input language (Rowe, 2012), demographic characteristics (Jo, 2013), higher socioeconomic status (Hart & Risley, 1995), positive parental caregiving attitudes (Wade et al., 2018; Park, 2014; Kim & Shin, 2013; Cho & Hong, 2010), positive parenting practices (Prime et al., 2023), and maternal attachment (Jo, 2013). However, research on how the emotional content conveyed through the vocabulary used by children affects their vocabulary development is still limited. Therefore, this study aims to explore the influence of positive words on children's language development. The vocabulary development outcomes of 264 children aged 18 to 36 months, as assessed by the Korean version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI) (Fenson et al., 1993), were used. We proposed two Emotional Vocabulary Lists. Firstly, Emotional Vocabulary List 1 was created based on a sentiment dictionary from Kunsan National University (KNU) containing 14,855 emotional words. To evaluate the emotional intensity of the vocabulary, Emotional Vocabulary List 2 was developed by referring to previous studies that used foreign emotional rating scales (Bradley & Lang, 1999; Braginsky et al., 2016; Brysbaert et al., 2014; Nencheva et al., 2023; Ponari et al., 2018) and incorporating responses from actual mothers. The number of vocabulary items matching the emotional vocabulary list and the emotional scores of the vocabulary were used to calculate the ratio of emotional word count and the ratio of emotional scores. To investigate the impact of these two ratio values on children's language development outcomes, a simple linear regression model was used via the R program. The research findings indicate that first, changes in the ratio of emotional word count significantly influence children's vocabulary development outcomes. Second, changes in the ratio of emotional scores also have a significant impact on children's vocabulary development outcomes. Although significant results were observed in both Emotional Vocabulary List 1 and Emotional Vocabulary List 2, the results derived from Emotional Vocabulary List 2, which incorporated emotional scores based on actual maternal responses, were more significant (p < .01). Third, the ratio of emotional word count and emotional scores did not significantly vary based on gender. Based on these three research findings, it is suggested that children, regardless of their gender, need positive input language from caregivers to express a substantial amount of positive vocabulary and, specifically, vocabulary with a high level of positivity.