Conversations from Arendelle: Children’s understanding of musical affect in a narrative, multimedia context

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.