Do You Like Me? Differences in Learning Social Cues in Adolescents with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)

The pathways to the documented increased social and emotional difficulties in individuals with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are unclear. We explored whether differences in social evaluation could account for social and emotional difficulties in adolescents with DLD using a computerized social evaluation task. Twenty-four adolescents with DLD were matched with twenty-six adolescents with typical language development (TLD) (M_age = 13.5 years, SE = 2.38; n = 18 female). They completed the Social Evaluation Learning Task (SELT; Button et al., 2015) which measures how quickly people learn the computer likes or dislikes either them or someone else. Adolescents and parents reported social and emotional functioning. Adolescents with DLD had poorer social understanding, in that they took longer to learn that the computer disliked them. They learned similarly to their TLD when the computer liked them and someone else. Adolescents with DLD also had higher self-reported anxiety and more parent reported emotional and peer problems; however, there was no mediational effect of social evaluation on socioemotional difficulties. This study demonstrates that adolescent with DLD have specific difficulties in interpreting cues that they are disliked by others but are just as good at understanding when they are liked. The differences seen in their social evaluation skills did not account for their increased socioemotional difficulties. This social evaluation bias might explain previous findings of good self-rated social competence while other ratings indicate social difficulties. Future research is necessary to investigate the implications of this finding further.