The Role of Affect and Emotion in Language Development
In this chapter, language development is discussed within a social-emotional framework. Children’s language processing is gated by social and emotional aspects of the interaction, such as affective prosodic and facial expression, contingent reactions, and joint attention. Infants and children attend to both cognitive and affective aspects in language perception (“language” vs. “paralanguage”) and in language production (“effort” vs. “engagement”). Deaf children acquiring a sign language go through the same developmental milestones in this respect. Modality-independently, a tripartite developmental sequence emerges: (i) an undifferentiated affect-dominated system governs the child’s behavior, (ii) a cognitive and language-dominated system emerges that attenuates the affective system, (iii) emotional expression is re-integrated into cognition and language. This tightly integrated cognitive-affective language system is characteristic of adults. Evolutionary scenarios are discussed that might underlie its ontogeny. The emotional context of learning might influence the course and outcome of L2-learning, too.