Bukhalenkova Daria, Veraksa Aleksander, Gavrilova Margarita, Kartushina Natalia
Department of Psychology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow 119991, Russia.
Psychological Institute of Russian Academy of Education, Moscow 125009, Russia.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2022 Apr 18;12(4):115. doi: 10.3390/bs12040115.
The effects of bilingualism on child development have been extensively examined in last decades. Research reveals that simultaneous use of two or more languages affects child's language development, cognitive and social skills. The current study focuses on the so-far understudied theory of emotion understanding in bilingual children. A cohort of 593 bilingual and monolingual 5-6-year-olds took the Russian version of the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) that assesses three components of emotion understanding: emotion understanding of external causes of emotions, reflective causes of emotions; and mental causes of emotions. Our results revealed no group differences between overall emotion understanding and understanding of external and reflective causes of emotions. However, monolingual children had a slightly better understanding of mental causes of emotions compared to bilingual children, when controlling for age, gender, and non-verbal intelligence. These results suggest that children growing up in bilingual environments might require more time and/or language/culture exposure to master the ability to understand mental causes of emotions, taking into account cultural differences, as well as the semantic and lexical differences in emotion labelling and emotion expression in each language.
在过去几十年里，双语对儿童发展的影响得到了广泛研究。研究表明，同时使用两种或更多语言会影响儿童的语言发展、认知和社交技能。当前的研究聚焦于双语儿童中迄今未得到充分研究的情绪理解理论。一组由593名5至6岁的双语和单语儿童参与了俄语版的情绪理解测试（TEC），该测试评估情绪理解的三个组成部分：对情绪外部原因的理解、反思性原因的理解以及情绪心理原因的理解。我们的研究结果显示，在整体情绪理解以及对情绪外部和反思性原因的理解方面，两组之间没有差异。然而，在控制年龄、性别和非语言智力因素后，单语儿童在对情绪心理原因的理解上比双语儿童略胜一筹。这些结果表明，考虑到文化差异以及每种语言在情绪标签和情绪表达方面的语义和词汇差异，在双语环境中成长的儿童可能需要更多时间和/或语言/文化接触来掌握理解情绪心理原因的能力。
