Relationship between emotion comprehension, vocabulary, and verbal working memory in intellectual developmental disorders: involvement of verbal reasoning skills

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the role of language-related abilities in emotion comprehension among young people with non-specific intellectual developmental disorders (NS-IDDs). Forty children and adolescents with NS-IDDs completed tasks assessing emotion comprehension, receptive vocabulary, verbal reasoning skills, and verbal working memory. Results showed that emotion comprehension was better predicted by comprehension of abstract words and verbal working memory, and that these two predictors were themselves predicted by verbal reasoning skills. These results therefore suggest a link between emotion understanding and verbal reasoning, which could be mediated by abstract vocabulary and verbal working memory. These findings provide insight into the relationships between emotion comprehension and language-related abilities in NS-IDDs.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion comprehension
• vocabulary
• intellectual developmental disabilities
• verbal reasoning
• verbal working memory

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to all the children and adolescents who took part in this study, as well as their parents, the schools and the clinical professionals involved in this research. Finally, we would like to thank Martin Robion for his statistical advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.