The role of inner speech in emotion recognition in children with and without developmental language disorder

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often have emotion recognition difficulties. Constructivist theories postulate that language, possibly via inner speech, helps categorise ambiguous behaviours into distinct emotion categories. The relationship between inner speech and emotion recognition may depend upon an abstract and precise word meaning structure. The present study examined how blocking inner speech affects emotion recognition in children with and without DLD, and how these effects relate to word meaning structure. Twenty-three fifth and sixth grade children with DLD, 45 vocabulary controls, and 52 grade controls sorted facial expressions by emotion under two conditions: articulatory suppression (reciting irrelevant verbal material) and motor suppression (foot tapping). Only vocabulary controls showed impaired emotion recognition under articulatory suppression, but not motor suppression. These effects were independent of word meaning structure. We tentatively conclude that unlike vocabulary controls, but similar to grade controls, children with DLD do not rely on inner speech for emotion recognition.