FROMANNUAL REVIEWS

CogSci 2025

•

July 31, 2025

•

San Francisco, United States

keywords:

corpus studies

language production

big data

psychology

emotion

Analysis of adult language shows positive correlations between a word’s affective features (valence, arousal) and those of its surrounding language context, but whether this extends to children’s language remains unclear. To address this, we quantified the emotional context of words within a large corpus of children’s written stories (N > 100,000, ages 7-13). Following Snefjella and Kuperman’s (2016) procedures, we defined a word’s context as the five content words immediately preceding and following it (10 in total). Context valence and arousal were computed for each occurrence and averaged across all occurrences in the corpus, yielding affective values for 24,383 words and their contexts. We found positive correlations between context-level and word-level affective variables (valence: r = 0.46, arousal: r = 0.32), consistent across the 7-13 age range. This study extends adult findings to children’s written language and provides a resource for future research on emotional contexts in language development.

Downloads

Paper

Next from CogSci 2025

Does Connecting the Processes and Products of Science Facilitate Learning? A Schema-Based Approach
poster

Does Connecting the Processes and Products of Science Facilitate Learning? A Schema-Based Approach

CogSci 2025

Rian Drexler and 1 other author

31 July 2025

Similar lecture

Language-based Valence and Arousal Expressions between the United States and China: a Cross-Cultural Examination
poster

Language-based Valence and Arousal Expressions between the United States and China: a Cross-Cultural Examination

NAACL 2025

Young Min Cho
Young Min Cho

01 May 2025

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

Select topic of interest (you can select more than one)

PRESENTATIONS

  • All Presentations
  • For Librarians
  • Resource Center
  • Free Trial
Underline Science, Inc.
1216 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA

© 2026 Underline - All rights reserved

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.