Children's judgments of emotion from conflicting cues in speech: why 6-year-olds are so inflexible.

Six-year-old children can judge a speaker's feelings either from content or paralanguage but have difficulty switching the basis of their judgments when these cues conflict. This inflexibility may relate to a lexical bias in 6-year-olds' judgments. Two experiments tested this claim. In Experiment 1, 6-year-olds (n = 40) were as inflexible when switching from paralanguage to content as when switching from content to paralanguage. In Experiment 2, 6-year-olds (n = 32) and adults (n = 32) had more difficulty when switching between conflicting emotion cues than conflicting nonemotional cues. Thus, 6-year-olds' inflexibility appears to be tied to the presence of conflicting emotion cues in speech rather than a bias to judge a speaker's feelings from content.