Open AccessSocio-Affective Word Production by Early Childhood Educators: Lexical Densities, Clusters, and Predictors
Author(s) -
Francisco José Lería Dulčić,
Roxaora Acosta Peña,
Patricia Ester Sasso Orellana
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
revista electrónica de investigación educativa
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.398
H-Index - 13
ISSN - 1607-4041
DOI - 10.24320/redie.2021.23.e21.4168
Subject(s) - psychology , sadness , developmental psychology , perception , cognition , cognitive psychology , connotation , social psychology , linguistics , anger , neuroscience , philosophy
This article presents a quantitative characterization of the language of early childhood educators, with the goal of identifying their lexical preferences and typical uses in the socio-affective domain. In this cross-sectional, descriptive study, 20 participants were selected by convenience sampling and provided continuous audio recordings, which were transcribed and categorized using LIWC2015 software. The findings show that the greatest lexical densities are associated with the categories “cognitive processes”, “relativity”, “social processes”, “affective processes”, and “perceptual processes”, and a number of subcategories like “motion” and “positive emotion”. Lower densities were found in “anxiety”, “sadness”, health”, “religion”, and “death”. Furthermore, two commonly used clusters were identified: one centered on words with an emotional connotation, and another centered on words with a social connotation. Lastly, the categories “body”, “health”, “motion”, “ingestion”, “causation”, “exclusion”, and “sexual” are good predictors of socio-affective word production. Our findings suggest a distinctive and prominent use of a number of semantic categories associated with the socio-affective domain. Future research directions and their potential to contribute to formative processes in early childhood education are also discussed.