Abstract
Background: Several recent studies have indicated that children with language impairment experience difficulty with various aspects of emotion understanding. Because emotion understanding skills are critical to successful social interaction, it is possible that these deficits play a role in the social problems frequently experienced by children with language difficulties.
Aims: To explore further the emotion understanding skills of children with language impairment, the investigation examined the ability of these children to understand emotion conveyed by prosody in a narrative passage.
Methods & Procedures: Nineteen children with language impairment and their chronological age‐matched peers served as participants. Children were sampled from the age range of 8–10;10 years. These children were presented with a seven‐sentence narrative read by actors to express happiness, anger, sadness, and fear. They were then asked to indicate what emotion the speaker expressed.
Outcomes & Results: Children with language impairment performed significantly more poorly than their typical peers in identifying the emotion expressed in the passage. There were also differences between emotions, with happiness being the easiest emotion to identify and fear the most difficult. The interaction between group and emotion type was not statistically significant.
Conclusions: The results provide additional evidence that children with language impairment may have impairments in emotion understanding. If these findings are replicated, interventions designed to facilitate emotion understanding as an aspect of social communication should be considered for some children with language impairment.
Notes
1. We use the terms ‘language impairment’ and ‘specific language impairment’ both to refer to children who have problematic language skills in the face of more typical cognitive, sensory, and motor development. In reviewing the literature, we use the term employed by the authors of the studies discussed.
2. For differing results for children with LI who spoke Swedish, which has a more complex prosodic system than English, see Fisher, Plante, Vance, Gerken, and Glattke (Citation2007) for differing results with children with LI who speak English. Also, see Samuelsson and Nettelbladt (Citation2004) for differing results with children with LI who speak Swedish, which has a more complex prosodic system than English.
3. In an additional study of Dutch‐speaking children with LI, Van der Meulen et al. (Citation1997) observed a trend (p = 0.065) supportive of these findings.
4. A detailed discussion of these tasks is beyond the scope of the current study. The dissemblance task is presented by Brinton et al. (Citation2007).
5. The US poverty level, as defined by the US Census Bureau, is based on family income, taking into account age and family composition. For example, for a family of three persons with one child under the age of 18, the US poverty level in 2003 was defined as a yearly income less than US$14 810 (€11 137 using the 2007 exchange rate).