Improving facial emotion recognition in children with developmental language disorder: Intentional or incidental training?
Let kids with DLD play 'guess the face' instead of giving them emotion rules.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Block et al. (2026) tested one 30-minute lesson on reading faces. Kids with developmental language disorder watched short clips. Some just saw faces and guessed the feeling. Others got rules like "wide eyes plus open mouth means fear." A third group got both.
After the lesson each child tried new faces. The team asked, "Which way teaches confused, nervous, and proud faces best?"
What they found
Kids who only watched and guessed got better at spotting confused faces. Kids who got rules did no better than before. The mix group also improved, but the watch-only edge was clearest.
One short play-along session was enough to boost a tricky emotion for children who already struggle with language.
How this fits with other research
Yung-Chan et al. (2023) followed preschoolers with DLD for two years. The children learned feeling words but stayed behind on reading faces. R et al. now show a quick incidental drill can close part of that gap in one shot.
McHugh et al. (2011) and Schmick et al. (2018) also used short video clips to teach emotions to autistic children. They found success too, but they used direct rules and extra examples. R et al. find rules add nothing for DLD, hinting that the best teaching style may hinge on the diagnosis.
Jarus et al. (2015) saw that kids with DCD learn motor skills worse when hints point their attention outside the body. R et al. show a parallel in the social domain: for DLD, outside-in rules don’t help face reading either.
Why it matters
If you run social-skills groups for school-age children with DLD, skip the mini-lectures on eyebrow angles. Instead give them lots of faces and let them guess, get feedback, and guess again. One short round can sharpen recognition of hard feelings like confused, which is often missed. Build a deck of short video clips, pause at the peak expression, and ask, "How does she feel?" Then tell them yes or no and keep the pace fast. No rules needed.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Children with Developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulties in developing age-appropriate expressive and receptive language skills. Reflecting the role of language in cognition, many children with DLD also experience difficulties in social cognition and learning. Specifically, challenges in facial emotion recognition, which is believed to be largely learned incidentally and even implicitly, are often reported. However, it remains unclear whether interventions aimed at improving this ability should be based on incidental, intentional, or a combination of both learning approaches. AIMS: This study compared the effectiveness of a single-session training focused on intentional learning (IntL), incidental learning (IncL), or a combination of both (COMB). METHOD: Children with DLD (N = 49; aged 9 -12 years) initially completed a facial emotion recognition task (ERT). Each child was then assigned to one of the three training conditions, which involved faces of different individuals displaying the two emotions most frequently confused during the ERT. The training required participants to match either the identity or emotional expression of faces showing the target emotions at 50 % intensity with those expressing the emotions at 100 % intensity. The conditions varied in the instructions provided, promoting either incidental or intentional learning. OUTCOMES: The post-training ERT revealed a significant reduction in incorrect recognition of the two most confused emotions in the COMB condition and particularly in the IncL condition. No significant reduction was observed in the IntL condition. IMPLICATIONS: These results support the potential -and perhaps even superiority- of training methods based on incidental associative learning for enhancing facial emotion recognition in children with DLD.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2026 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2026.105221