A Multimodal Comparison of Emotion Categorization Abilities in Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Efficacy, Feasibility, and Acceptability of an Emotional Competence Tele-Intervention for Mandarin-Speaking Children Aged 5 to 7 Years With Developmental Language Disorder: Pilot Study With an Interrupted Time-Series Design

BACKGROUND

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often experience language difficulties that hinder their ability to acquire emotional competence. Poor emotional competence is associated with emotional and behavioral problems in young children.

OBJECTIVE

This research involved two studies focusing on (1) the emotional competence of Mandarin-speaking children aged 5 to 7 years with DLD and (2) the efficacy, feasibility, and acceptability of a tele-intervention designed to enhance their emotional competence in Taiwan.

METHODS

Five children with DLD from study 1 declined to participate in study 2, the emotional competence tele-intervention, and were excluded from the analysis. We compared the emotional competence of 20 Mandarin-speaking children with DLD to that of 24 children with typical language development (TLD). The children with DLD were, on average, aged 5.79 (SD 0.47) years, whereas the children with TLD were, on average, aged 5.93 (SD 0.31) years. We assessed the children's emotional competence, nonverbal ability, verbal comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, and expressive language skills. In study 2, all children with DLD included in study 1 engaged in an emotional competence tele-intervention. An interrupted time-series design was used to examine their emotional competence. In total, 20 children with DLD provided data on emotional competence evaluated using the Emotional Lexicon Test. These data were individually collected at 3 time points after study 1 (time 1). These phases included baseline (time 1 to time 2), during the tele-intervention (time 2 to time 3), and follow-up (time 3 to time 4), spanning approximately 18 to 20 weeks from time 1 to time 4. Recruitment, retention, and attendance rates were calculated to evaluate the intervention's feasibility, and participant mood was evaluated after each session to calculate the intervention's acceptability.

RESULTS

No significant changes in the children's ability to understand basic or complex emotional terms were observed during the baseline period. However, changes were observed during the tele-intervention period, and these changes remained throughout the follow-up period. With a recruitment rate of 80% (20/25), all participants completed 4 intervention sessions, with retention and attendance rates exceeding 95% (19/20). A total of 90% (18/20) of the participants deemed each session to be acceptable.

CONCLUSIONS

Mandarin-speaking children aged 5 to 7 years with DLD exhibited lower emotional competence compared with their counterparts with TLD. Tele-interventions are effective in enhancing the emotional competence of children with DLD, demonstrating feasibility and acceptability for these children and their parents in Taiwan.

Processing of Scene-Grammar Inconsistencies in Children with Developmental Language Disorder-Insights from Implicit and Explicit Measures

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES

Developmental language disorders (DLD) are often associated with co-occurring neurodevelopmental difficulties, including attentional or social-emotional problems. Another nonverbal domain, i.e., visual cognition and its relationship to DLD, is virtually unexplored. However, learning visuospatial regularities-a scene-grammar-is crucial for navigating our daily environment. These regularities show certain similarities to the structure of language and there is preliminary evidence for a relationship between scene processing and language competence in preschoolers with and without DLD. This study compared implicit and explicit visuospatial knowledge of everyday indoor scenes in older children, aged 6 to 10 years, of both groups.

METHODS

We measured 'dwell times' on semantic and syntactic object-scene inconsistencies via eye-tracking and performance in an object-placement task, and their associations with children's language, visual, and cognitive skills.

RESULTS

Visual attention towards object-scene inconsistencies was highly comparable between groups, but children with DLD scored lower in a visual perception test and higher language skills were associated with higher visuo-cognitive performance in both tasks. In the explicit scene-grammar measurement, this relationship only existed for children with DLD and disappeared when nonverbal cognitive performance was controlled.

CONCLUSIONS

Our study suggests the existence of mild problems in visuospatial processing co-occurring with DLD, which is partly influenced by age and nonverbal cognitive ability. The acquisition of visual cognition and linguistic knowledge is an interactive, multimodal process where the perception of objects in scenes might affect how the words for these objects are learned and vice versa. A better understanding of this interplay could eventually have impact on the diagnosis and treatment of DLD.

Developmental Language Disorder Is Associated With Slower Processing Across Domains: A Meta-Analysis of Time-Based Tasks

PURPOSE

Individuals with developmental language disorder (DLD) often exhibit slower processing on time-based tasks in comparison with age-matched peers. Processing speed has been linked to various linguistic skills and might serve as a global indicator of individual differences in language abilities. Despite an extensive literature on processing speed in DLD, it remains unclear whether slower processing is domain general or restricted to linguistic and/or auditory tasks.

METHOD

This meta-analysis used robust variance estimation to compare response/reaction times (RTs) of DLD and age-matched groups (N = 812 DLD, 870 neurotypical; M _age [DLD] = 8.9 years, range: 4.3-22.7 years). Moderators included task (simple RT, choice RT, naming, congruent/baseline conditions of interference control tasks), stimulus type (linguistic/nonlinguistic), stimulus modality (auditory/nonauditory), and response modality (verbal/nonverbal). Age and publication year were covariates.

RESULTS

The overall effect based on 46 studies and 144 estimates indicated longer mean RTs in DLD groups (g = .47, p < .001, 95% CI [.38, .55]). Moderator analyses indicated larger effects when tasks required verbal as opposed to nonverbal responses. No other moderators approached significance. All subgroup analyses were significant, indicating longer mean RTs in DLD groups across tasks, stimulus types, stimulus modalities, and response modalities.

CONCLUSIONS

Individuals with DLD exhibit longer RTs across verbal and nonverbal tasks, which may contribute to observed difficulties in language, motor skills, and executive functioning. Simple processing speed measures should be included in screening for language delays but may not be suitable for differential diagnosis, given that slower processing may occur across multiple disorders.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21809355.

Emotional Speech Processing in 3- to 12-Month-Old Infants: Influences of Emotion Categories and Acoustic Parameters

PURPOSE

The aim of this study was to investigate infants' listening preference for emotional prosodies in spoken words and identify their acoustic correlates.

METHOD

Forty-six 3- to-12-month-old infants (M _age = 7.6 months) completed a central fixation (or look-to-listen) paradigm in which four emotional prosodies (happy, sad, angry, and neutral) were presented. Infants' looking time to the string of words was recorded as a proxy of their listening attention. Five acoustic variables-mean fundamental frequency (F0), word duration, intensity variation, harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), and spectral centroid-were also analyzed to account for infants' attentiveness to each emotion.

RESULTS

Infants generally preferred affective over neutral prosody, with more listening attention to the happy and sad voices. Happy sounds with breathy voice quality (low HNR) and less brightness (low spectral centroid) maintained infants' attention more. Sad speech with shorter word duration (i.e., faster speech rate), less breathiness, and more brightness gained infants' attention more than happy speech did. Infants listened less to angry than to happy and sad prosodies, and none of the acoustic variables were associated with infants' listening interests in angry voices. Neutral words with a lower F0 attracted infants' attention more than those with a higher F0. Neither age nor sex effects were observed.

CONCLUSIONS

This study provides evidence for infants' sensitivity to the prosodic patterns for the basic emotion categories in spoken words and how the acoustic properties of emotional speech may guide their attention. The results point to the need to study the interplay between early socioaffective and language development.

Facial emotion processing and language during early-to-middle childhood development: An event related potential study

Facial emotion processing (FEP) is critical to social cognitive ability. Developmentally, FEP rapidly improves in early childhood and continues to be fine-tuned throughout middle childhood and into adolescence. Previous research has suggested that language plays a role in the development of social cognitive skills, including non-verbal emotion recognition tasks. Here we investigated whether language is associated with specific neurophysiological indicators of FEP. One hundred and fourteen children (4-12 years) completed a language assessment and a FEP task including stimuli depicting anger, happiness, fear, and neutrality. EEG was used to record key event related potentials (ERPs; P100, N170, LPP at occipital and parietal sites separately) previously shown to be sensitive to faces and facial emotion. While there were no main effects of language, the P100 latency to negative expressions appeared to increase with language, while LPP amplitude increased with language for negative and neutral expressions. These findings suggest that language is linked to some early physiological indicators of FEP, but this is dependent on the facial expression. Future studies should explore the role of language in later stages of neural processing, with a focus on processes localised to ventromedial prefrontal regions.

Unisensory and Multisensory Stroop Effects Modulate Gender Differences in Verbal and Nonverbal Emotion Perception

Purpose This study aimed to examine the Stroop effects of verbal and nonverbal cues and their relative impacts on gender differences in unisensory and multisensory emotion perception. Method Experiment 1 investigated how well 88 normal Chinese adults (43 women and 45 men) could identify emotions conveyed through face, prosody and semantics as three independent channels. Experiments 2 and 3 further explored gender differences during multisensory integration of emotion through a cross-channel (prosody-semantics) and a cross-modal (face-prosody-semantics) Stroop task, respectively, in which 78 participants (41 women and 37 men) were asked to selectively attend to one of the two or three communication channels. Results The integration of accuracy and reaction time data indicated that paralinguistic cues (i.e., face and prosody) of emotions were consistently more salient than linguistic ones (i.e., semantics) throughout the study. Additionally, women demonstrated advantages in processing all three types of emotional signals in the unisensory task, but only preserved their strengths in paralinguistic processing and showed greater Stroop effects of nonverbal cues on verbal ones during multisensory perception. Conclusions These findings demonstrate clear gender differences in verbal and nonverbal emotion perception that are modulated by sensory channels, which have important theoretical and practical implications. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16435599.