The occurrence of idioms in the emotion lexicon of children
This paper reports on two studies on the development of the emotion lexicon of
German-speaking children in the age range from five to ten. Study 1 is based on
a production task using picture stories to elicit the participants’ emotion lexicon.
Study 2 involves a perception task in which participants are asked to sort
several idiomatic and non-idiomatic lexical expressions for anger, fear, and joy
with respect to similarity of meaning and intensity. While Study 1 verifies that
idioms only occur from the fourth-grade on, Study 2 provides evidence for an
earlier occurrence of idioms. In addition, the analysis points to major changes
caused by the integration of idioms into the emotion lexicon of children.