Does emotional narrative context influence the retention of newly learned words?

In this pilot study, we hypothesized that emotional information in stories allows children to get involved in the verbal interaction. This involvement, in turn, might result in improvement of children’s memory capabilities in learning new words. To test the hypothesis, 20 German-speaking children listened to stories containing the spatial prepositions behind and next to. These words were
presented within ‘emotional stories’ to the experimental group (N = 10) and within ‘neutral stories’ to the control group (N = 10). Stories only differed in relevant emotional variations: We used different kinds of emotional language such as adjectives (happy, excited), affective markers in the form of direct speech (look here!, shouting loud: “I’m coming”), connotations (spring, friend,
favorite dish), and emotional physical descriptions (the wind is whistling) to enhance the emotional content in the stories. Our results did not support our hypothesis as both groups showed a similar amount of learning: Children trained with the ‘emotional stories’ retained the learned target prepositions as well as children trained with the ‘neutral’ stories. Results from a delayed test also revealed that all children improved their retention of the newly learned words over time. This study presents a first approach to investigate the role of emotion in young children’s word learning in the context of picture book reading. The results are discussed critically with respect to the methods and
materials.