Children’s emotional norms for 600 French words

• DOI: 10.3758/brm.41.1.213
• Publication Date: 2009-01-30T16:38:06Z
• Authors: Arielle Syssau; Catherine Monnier
• Keywords: Affect; 03 medical and health sciences; 0302 clinical medicine; Child, Preschool; 4. Education; Speech Perception; Humans; France; Child; Vocabulary

The present study provides a French child database containing a large corpus of words (N = 600) that were rated on emotional valence (positive, neutral, and negative) by French children differing in both age (5, 7, and 9 years old) and sex (girls and boys). Good response reliability was observed in each of the three age groups. The results showed some age differences in the children's ratings. With increasing age, the percentage of words rated positive decreased, whereas the percentage of neutral words increased and the percentage of negative words remained stable. Our study did not reveal marked differences across sex groups. The database compiled here should become a useful tool for experimental studies in which verbal material is used with children. It would be worthwhile in future research to study how children process emotional words and also to control the emotional variable in the same way as other linguistic variables in the experimental design. The norms from this study may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.