Do children with language impairment tell depressing and anxious stories? An emotion-based narrative language sample analysis of over 1000 children

Children with language impairment (LI) experience increased mental health challenges, which may be reflected in the words they use to tell stories. We examined whether children with LI produced more emotionally negative narratives than typically developing (TD) children, and whether lower lexical diversity (a proxy for vocabulary size) was associated with more negativity. Language samples were analyzed from four corpora, totaling 1197 children, ages 3–15. In the two larger corpora, there was evidence for increased negativity in LI children compared to TD children. However, this increased negativity in LI children was not observed across all measures of emotional valence in the two larger corpora, nor was it observed in any measure in the two smaller corpora (and was in the opposite direction on one measure in one of the smaller corpora). There were many associations within both the LI and TD groups between lower lexical diversity and more negativity, indicating that children with smaller vocabularies produced narratives with elevated negativity, but these associations were generally small and sometimes absent or in the reverse direction. In sum, the negative emotions that are known to be experienced by children with weaker language abilities may manifest in their stories, but the results were inconclusive, and more research is needed. Implications for speech-language pathology and clinical psychology are discussed.