The way in which emotion interacts with cognition has been of great interest to researchers for hundreds of years. Emotion has been shown to play an important role in attention, learning and memory. However, the way in which emotion influences the basic process of word learning in infancy has largely been ignored. In the current paper, the mechanisms by which emotion can influence word learning are explored in three contexts, embedded within the stimulus, as a socio-pragmatic cue and within the child.