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Email to connect: shhu5896@colorado.edu

Title: Emotions in Bilinguals

Abstract:

• Educational policies and curricula reflect the growing attention to emotion development to promote children’s academic success (Eisenberg et al., 2005), yet little is known about emotion competency skills in bilingual children. Emotion competency skills, including our understanding and expression of emotion words (happy, sad), emerge from our culture- and language-specific experiences within a sociocultural context (Tsai, 2007). Unlike monolinguals, bilingual children learn emotion words in a home language that is different from English and in a sociocultural context that is different from the mainstream school setting. Moreover, bilingual children’s language proficiency varies, depending on when, where, how often, and with whom they are exposed to each language. Accordingly, their dual language profile and cultural experiences may shape their emotion competency skills. This study will 1) examine the differences in emotion competency skills between the home language and English, and 2) examine the role each language plays in emotion competency skills. This study will contribute to our understanding of bilingual children’s emotion competency skills, which can have implications in developing more culturally-linguistically appropriate socioemotional educational curricula.

• ICS Program: Dual PhD
• Advisor: Pui Fong Kan
• Home degree department: Speech Language Hearing Sciences
• Name of research lab: Child Language Learning Laboratory