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

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.