Does talking about emotions impact young Turkish children's emotion recognition, word learning, and story comprehension?

Abstract

In this study, we tested the effect of emotion-supported dialogic reading on word learning, story comprehension, and emotion recognition skills of 3-4 years old children. We conducted a within-subject design with a group where the children participated only in dialogic reading sessions (control) and a group where children participated emotion-supported dialogic reading sessions (experimental). 20 Turkish children (11 girls and 9 boys) from low socioeconomic status families participated in the study. Before the intervention, we measured children's basic emotion recognition skills. Eight storybook readings carried out the intervention. Next, we tested children's retelling, word learning, and emotion recognition. The results showed that children did significantly better recognising basic emotions. In addition, children in Emotion-Supported Dialogic Reading understand the stories better than Only Dialogic Reading. However, children's receptive and expressive vocabulary learning did not differ significantly.