Age-dependent changes of thinking about verbs

We investigated the knowledge of emotional and motor verbs in children andadolescents from three age ranges (8–11, 12–15, 16–19 years). Participants estimatedthe verbs familiarity, age of acquisition, valence, arousal, imageability, and motor- andemotion-relatedness. Participants were familiar with theverbs in our dataset. The younger(8–11) attributed an emotional character to the verbs less frequently than the middle(12–15) and the older (16–19) groups. In the 8–11 group malesrated the verbs asemotion-related less frequently than females. Results indicate that processing verbalconcepts as emotion-related develops gradually, and after12–15 is rather stable. The ageof acquisition (AoA) develops late: the older (16–19) had a higher awareness in reportingthat they learnt the verbs earlier as compared to the estimations made by the younger(8–11 and 12–15). AoA positively correlated with attribution of emotion relatednessmeaning that emotion-related verbs were learned later. Arousal was comparable acrossages. Also it increased when attributing motor relatednessto verbs and decreasedwhen attributing emotion relatedness. Reporting the verbs’ affective valence (happy vs.unhappy) changes with age: younger (8–11) judged the verbs generally more “happy”than both the older groups. Instead the middle and the older group did not showdifferences. Happiness increased when processing the verbs as motor related anddecreased when processing the verbs as emotion related. Ageaffected imageability:the younger (8–11) considered the verbs easier to be imagined than the two oldergroups, suggesting that at this age vividness estimation isstill rough, while after 12–15 isstable as the 12–15 and 15–19 group did not differ. Imageability predicted arousal, AoA,emotion- and motor-relatedness indicating that this indexinfluences the way verbs areprocessed. Imageability was positively correlated to emotion relatedness, indicating thatsuch verbs were harder to be imagined, and negatively to motor relatedness. Imageablitypositively correlated with valence meaning that verbs receiving positive valence were alsothose that were hard to be imagined, and negatively correlated with arousal, meaning thatverbs that were harder to be imagined elicited low physiological activation. Our resultsgive an insight in the development of emotional and motor-related verbs representations.