Short report: Longitudinal study on emotion understanding in children with and without developmental language disorder.
Preschoolers with DLD can learn to name feelings but still need help reading faces years later.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Yung-Chan et al. (2023) followed preschoolers with developmental language disorder for two years. They checked how well these kids understood emotions compared to typically developing peers.
The team tested verbal skills like naming emotions. They also tested non-verbal skills like reading faces. Kids took the same tests every year.
What they found
Children with DLD caught up when asked to name feelings with words. But they still lagged behind when reading faces without words.
The gap in non-verbal emotion reading stayed wide even after two years.
How this fits with other research
Block et al. (2026) extends this finding. They showed that older kids with DLD can boost face-reading skills through incidental games, not direct lessons. This matches the lag Yung-Ting found and offers a fix.
Merken et al. (2025) used the same long-haul design. They saw that non-verbal IQ in DLD preschoolers moves in three paths: up, flat, or down. Together, these studies warn us not to trust a single early score for any non-verbal skill.
Michel et al. (2024) looked at bilingual DLD preschoolers and found vocabulary stayed low. Yung-Ting shows emotion labels can catch up, so language goals and emotion goals may need different timelines.
Why it matters
If you serve preschoolers with DLD, plan separate goals for verbal and non-verbal emotion work. Keep teaching feeling words, but do not drop face-reading drills. Add quick incidental games like matching faces while playing, not sit-down lessons. Re-check both skills yearly; growth is not guaranteed.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficult access to social interactions, which could in turn limit their opportunities to learn about others' emotions. AIMS: This study aimed to investigate the developmental trajectories of emotion understanding in young children with and without DLD. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: 95 DLD children and 149 non-DLD children were tested twice, with an approximately two-year interval (Mage = 3.58 years at Time 1), on three indices for emotion understanding (discrimination, identification, and attribution in emotion-evoking situations). 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.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2023 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2023.104493