Andrea Dance, Martha Gray, Natalie Roach, and Dr. Martin Fujiki, Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology
As part of a research team consisting of professors of Speech-Language Pathology and Psychology and graduate students, our goal was to achieve a clearer understanding of the relationship between emotion and language. We wanted to see if children with restricted language abilities also have deficits in emotional development. We tested children in schools measuring their language ability, IQ, understanding of emotion expressed in a variety of ways.
Specific Language Impairment (LI) is a disorder that affects the comprehension and production of language. Children with LI have normal intelligence, hearing, and motor development, in the face of these deficits. It has recently been established that children with SLI also have difficulty functioning socially.
In our research explored the variables that underlie these social problems. One particular factor that we found to influence social functioning is emotion understanding. The development of emotion understanding is linked to language development (Denham, 1998). Thus, its possible that poor language development could be linked to poor emotion understanding, which would lead to problematic social interactions.
Children with language impairment (LI) have often been observed to have problems in peer interaction. These problems include difficulty entering ongoing interactions, participating in cooperating learning groups, and interacting in mutual friendships (Brinton & Fujiki, 2004). One factor that contributes to these problems is that children with LI are often highly reticent. Reticence is a type of withdrawn behavior in which children would like to interact with peers but are fearful of doing so. The purpose of this study was to examine reticence along with other emotions in elementary school age children with LI, controlling for the influence of nonverbal intelligence.
Participants included 20 children with LI and 20 children with typical language skills, ranging in age from 7 to 10 years. Of the 40 participants, 20 were female and 20 were male. Children with LI were selected based on enrollment in language intervention and at least one formal language test score over one standard deviation below the mean. Typical children were randomly selected from children of the same age and gender as the child with LI, from the same classrooms. All participants were administered the Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (Bracken & McCallum, 2003) and the Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) to ensure that group assignments were appropriate.
The teachers of the participants completed the Teacher Behavior Rating Scale (Hart & Robinson, 1996, TBRS). Each teacher completed the scale on at least two participants, one for a child with LI and one for that child’s typical match. The TBRS consisted of 161 items examining a range of socioemotional behaviors. A subset of items, randomly placed within the overall total number of items, examined reticent behavior. These items were selected from the overall database for further analysis.
The teacher ratings of reticence for both groups were compared using a one-way analysis of variance, with group membership serving as the independent variable. This analysis revealed a significant main effect for group [F(1, 37) = 24.52, p < .0001]. Children with LI who demonstrated reticence had comparatively high ratings, producing a mean score of 4.1 (SD= 2.45), compared to a rating for the typical children of 1.0 (SD = 1.34)(the higher the score, the greater the reticence). This study demonstrated that children with LI were significantly more reticent and had more difficulty understanding and regulating emotion compared to their typical peers. This reticence and emotion incompetence, compounded with problematic language skills, is likely to significantly impact their social relationships with peers. These findings suggest that intervention focused on language skills to help children be more interactive in dealing with peers would be beneficial.