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The current study set out to examine physiological arousal and the emotional response associated with word learning success in young three-year-old predominantly white children. In particular, we examined whether children’s physiological arousal during a word learning task predicts their word learning success and whether successful learning predicts children’s subsequent positive emotions that may be triggered by their success at the task. We presented children (n = 50) with a cross-situational word learning task and measured their pupillary arousal during and following completion of the task, as well as changes to their upper body posture following completion of the task, as indices of children’s emotions during and following task completion. Children who showed greater physiological arousal during the novel word recognition task (n=40) showed improved subsequent word recognition performance. We found that children showed more elevated posture after completing a familiar word learning task compared to completing a novel word learning task (n=33) but results on children’s individual learning success and postural elevation were mixed. We discuss the findings with regards to children’s affective involvement in word learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children's learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children's language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 13 countries and 12 languages were evaluated at the beginning and end of the first lockdown period in their respective countries (from March to September 2020). Children who had less passive screen exposure and whose caregivers read more to them showed larger gains in vocabulary development during lockdown, after controlling for SES and other caregiver-child activities. Children also gained more words than expected (based on normative data) during lockdown; either caregivers were more aware of their child's development or vocabulary development benefited from intense caregiver-child interaction during lockdown.