Short Report: Longitudinal study on emotion understanding in children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

Background: Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficult access to social interactions, which could in turn limit their opportunities to learn about others’ emotions.

Aims: This study aimed to investigate the developmental trajectories of emotion understanding in young children with and without DLD.

Methods and procedures: 95 DLD children and 149 non-DLD children were tested twice, with an approximately two-year interval (Mage = 3.58 years at Time 1), on three indices for emotion understanding (discrimination, identification, and attribution in emotion-evoking situations).

Outcomes and results: At Time 2, DLD children fell behind their non-DLD peers on the non-verbal task for emotion discrimination, while catching up on the verbal tasks for emotion identification and attribution. The two groups developed most of these skills with a similar improvement over time, but DLD children showed a greater increase in positive emotion identification and attribution with age than non-DLD children.

Conclusions and implications: The findings showed the potential of DLD children to understand others’ emotions in verbal tasks to a similar extent as their non-DLD peers. However, DLD children may still face difficulties understanding more implicit emotional messages in real-life situations, and longitudinal follow-ups are required to reveal these challenges.