Facial Emotion Recognition Difficulties in Children With Developmental Language Disorder: A Predominantly Linguistic Issue

PURPOSE: Developmental language disorder (DLD) has been associated with difficulties in several cognitive and emotional domains, including emotion recognition (ER). However, the literature remains inconclusive on whether the ER difficulties extend to emotion discrimination-limited to perceptual processing-or affect more advanced stages of emotional identification, which are necessary for labeling emotions. The primary aim of this study was to explore potential impairments in facial ER in children with DLD. METHOD: Sixty-three Spanish-Catalan bilingual children (24 DLD), aged between 9.3 and 13.9 years, performed two computerized visual ER tasks based on facial expressions: an emotion matching task and an emotion labeling task, targeting perceptual and knowledge face processing stages, respectively. Accuracy and decision time (DT) measures were collected. RESULTS: Children with DLD showed significantly lower accuracy (but not slower DT) than typically developing peers in the emotion labeling task, but not in the emotion matching task. These results suggested that children with DLD struggle with the emotional knowledge processing stage (labeling task) while preserving the ability to perceptually process emotions. Further regression analyses indicated that general language skills and verbal theory of mind jointly contributed to explaining the performance in emotion labeling but not in face matching. CONCLUSION: Our study provides new insights into the extent of the difficulties in ER from facial expressions in children with DLD, evidencing limitations at the linguistic, but not the perceptual, level. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.33166634.