Assessment of Phonological Awareness: Effects of Emotional Words on Preschoolers' Skills

Phonological awareness is recognized as a precursor to reading success. Choosing material to assess children's phonological awareness is a major challenge. The literature highlights factors that can influence children's phonological skills, such as the frequency of words, their lexical status, and their linguistic parameters. To date, no study has looked at the potential effect of the emotional parameters of words on phonological skills. The emotional polarity of words (valence: pleasant, unpleasant) has effects on cognitive skills related to phonological awareness, i.e., executive functions, and working memory. The aim of this research is to measure the influence of emotional (positive, negative) and non-emotional (neutral, nonwords) words on the phonological awareness of children aged 4-6 years. Our results show a differential effect of emotional valence words on phonological skills. More specifically, the emotional valence of words facilitates the performance of epiphonological tasks, whereas negative valence disrupts the performance of metaphonological tasks. These results are discussed in relation to current models of interaction between emotion and cognition.