Journal Article

A Multimodal Comparison of Emotion Categorization Abilities in Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Schwarzer, Gudrun, Vesker, Michael, Bahn, Daniela, Kauschke, Christina

2021

Overview

Purpose: Current research has demonstrated that behavioral, emotional, and/or social difficulties often accompany developmental language disorder (DLD). It is an open question to what degrees such difficulties arise as consequence of impaired language and communicative skills, or whether they might also be driven by deficits in verbal and nonverbal emotion processing (e.g., the reduced ability to infer and verbalize emotional states from facial expressions). Regarding the existence of nonverbal deficits, previous research has yielded inconsistent findings. This study was aimed at gaining deeper knowledge of the basic aspects of emotion understanding in children with DLD by comparing their performance on nonverbal and verbal emotion categorization tasks to that of typically developing children. Method: Two verbal tasks (Lexical Decision and Valence Decision With Emotion Terms) and two nonverbal tasks (Face Decision and Valence Decision With Facial Expressions) were designed to parallel each other as much as possible, and conducted with twenty-six 6- to 10-year-old children diagnosed with DLD. The same number of typically developed children, carefully matched by age and gender, served as a control group. Results: The children with DLD showed lower performance in both verbal tasks and exhibited noticeable problems in the nonverbal emotion processing task. In particular, they achieved lower accuracy scores when they categorized faces by their valence (positive or negative), but did not differ in their ability to distinguish these faces from pictures displaying animals. Conclusions: This study provides evidence for the hypothesis that problems in emotion processing in children with DLD might be multimodal. Therefore, the results support the idea of mutual influences in the development of language and emotion skills and contribute to the current debate about the domain specificity of DLD (formerly referred to as specific language impairment).

• Publisher: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
• Subject: Ability / Accuracy / Animals / Behavior / Care and treatment / Children / Children & youth / Classification / Clinical Diagnosis / Communication Skills / Comparative Analysis / Control Groups / Decision Making / Decisions / Developmental Delays / Developmental disabilities / Emotional Intelligence / Emotional Response / Emotional states / Emotions / Emotions in children / Executive Function / Existential constructions / Facial expressions / Foreign Countries / Human Body / Interpersonal Competence / Language / Language acquisition / Language disorders / Language Impairments / Language Processing / Language Skills / Language Tests / Multimodality / Nonverbal Communication / Nonverbal tasks / Pictorial Stimuli / Processing speed / Recognition (Psychology) / Scores / Skills / Social research / Specific language impairment / Task Analysis / Task performance / Valence / Verbal Communication / Verbal tasks