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

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.