Children’s verbatim memory for song lyrics has been broadly investigated in the psychological literature, but little is known about the developmental course of children’s ability to construct meaning from familiar multimedia songs containing both concrete and metaphorical language. The present study examined age-related change in children’s understanding of the hit song “Let It Go” using a brief comprehension measure and a semi-structured interview conducted over Zoom. Participants included 51 children from 3- to 10-year-olds whose parents reported that they were familiar with and enjoyed Frozen. Participants’ comprehension of the song was assessed using a visual comprehension measure. They then co-viewed the music video, with the researcher pausing at several time points in the song to ask how the child thought Elsa was feeling and how the child knew. A grounded analysis of participants’ responses yielded five categories that comprehensively captured the range of cues (song lyrics, non-lyrical musical elements, observable action on screen, character appearance, and non-observable narrative elements). A median split of the sample revealed that older children referenced more converging cues to explain their thinking on Elsa’s emotion during the song and that older children referenced musical cues (both lyrical and non-lyrical) significantly more than younger children.

中文翻译：

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阿伦黛尔的对话：儿童在叙事、多媒体背景下对音乐情感的理解


心理学文献对儿童对歌词的逐字记忆进行了广泛的研究，但人们对儿童从包含具体语言和隐喻语言的熟悉的多媒体歌曲中构建意义的能力的发展过程知之甚少。本研究通过简短的理解测量和通过 Zoom 进行的半结构化访谈，研究了儿童对热门歌曲“Let It Go”的理解与年龄相关的变化。参与者包括 51 名 3 至 10 岁的儿童，他们的父母表示他们熟悉并喜欢《冰雪奇缘》。使用视觉理解测量来评估参与者对歌曲的理解。然后，他们共同观看了音乐视频，研究人员在歌曲中的几个时间点停下来询问孩子认为艾尔莎的感受如何以及孩子是如何知道的。对参与者反应的扎根分析产生了五个类别，全面捕捉了线索的范围（歌词、非抒情音乐元素、屏幕上可观察的动作、角色外观和不可观察的叙事元素）。样本的中位数分布显示，年龄较大的孩子引用更多的聚合线索来解释他们对歌曲中艾尔莎情绪的看法，并且年龄较大的孩子比年龄较小的孩子更多地引用音乐线索（抒情的和非抒情的）。