A Drawing Task to Assess Emotion Inference in Language-Impaired Children

Studies investigating the ability of children with language impairment (LI) to infer emotions rely on verbal responses (which can be challenging for these children) and/or the selection of a card representing an emotion (which limits the response range). In contrast, a drawing task might allow a broad spectrum of responses without involving language. This study used a drawing task to compare the ability to make emotional inferences in children with and without LI.

Twenty-two children with LI and 22 typically developing children ages 6 to 10 years were assessed in school during 3 sessions. They were asked to listen to audio stories. At specific moments, the experimenter stopped the recording and asked children to complete the drawing of a face to depict the emotion felt by the story's character. Three adult study-blind judges were subsequently asked to evaluate the expressiveness of the drawings.

Children with LI had more difficulty than typically developing children making emotional inferences. Children with LI also made more errors of different valence than their typically developing peers.

Our findings confirm that children with LI show difficulty in producing emotional inferences, even when performing a drawing task--a relatively language-free response mode.