The acquisition of language and emotional competence is of key im-portance for a healthy development. While previous research has yielded a wealth of knowledge regarding the developmental aspects and characteristics of either language competence or emotion competence, these competences have rarely been studied conjointly. Though there is some evidence that emotional competence and language competence are related in early development, the precise nature of the relationship between the two

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... cts, especially in later development, is still an open question. Extant studies almost exclusively focused on the preschool age and considered only a select few components of both con-structs. To fill this gap, this thesis aimed at examining the relationship of language competence and emotional competence during middle childhood by considering multiple facets of both competences. As children's emotion lexicon is one of the key interfaces between language and emotional competence and research on the development of children's emotion lexicon almost exclusively focused on early preschool years, I investigated school-age children's productive emotion lexicon. Further, due to a lack of research on later emotional development, little is known about children's conceptualizations of complex emotions. I addressed this issue by investigating children's declarative, conceptual knowledge of the two self- conscious emotions pride and shame. For these two purposes, language was used as a lens through which the process of conceptualization and knowledge representation, i.e. the conceptual structure, within the emotion domain can be examined. Study 1 assessed relations between various facets of language compe-tence and emotional competence in a sample of school-age children. Bivariate correlation analyses confirmed positive relations between the majority of facets of language competence and emotional competence. In detail, lexical-semantic and reading abilities – in the realm of language competence – and declarative emotion knowledge – in [...]