Children with mixed language disorder do not discriminate accurately facial identity when expressions change

We investigated the recognition of pairs of faces (same or different facial identities and expressions) in two groups of 14 children aged 6-10 years, with either an expressive language disorder (ELD), or a mixed language disorder (MLD), and two groups of 14 matched healthy controls. When looking at their global performances, children with either expressive (ELD) or MLD have few differences from controls in either face or emotional recognition. At contrary, we found that children with MLD, but not those with ELD, take identical faces to be different if their expressions change. Since children with mixed language disorders are socially more impaired than children with ELD, we think that these features may partly underpin the social difficulties of these children.