Quantifying the emergence of moral foundational lexicon in child language development.

ABSTRACT: Theorists have argued that morality builds on several core modular foundations. When do different moral foundations emerge in life? Prior work has explored the conceptual development of different aspects of morality in childhood. Here, we offer an alternative approach to investigate the developmental emergence of moral foundations through the lexicon, namely the words used to talk about moral foundations. We develop a large-scale longitudinal analysis of the linguistic mentions of five moral foundations (in both virtuous and vicious forms) in naturalistic speech between English-speaking children with ages ranging from 1 to 6 and their caretakers. Using computational methods, we collect a dataset of 1,371 human-annotated moral utterances and automatically annotate around one million utteran

SUBMITTER: Ramezani A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11334335 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature