Children's Understanding of Emotion in Speech.

Explored in three experiments children's understanding of emotion in speech. Found gradual developmental change from 4-year-olds' focus on content to adult's focus on paralanguage. Children exhibited greater response latencies to utterances with conflicting cues than to those with nonconflicting cues. They accurately labeled affective paralanguage when propositional emotion cues were obscured by foreign language or by low-pass filtering. (Author/KB)