Ability of children with language impairment to understand emotion conveyed by prosody in a narrative passage

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.