Abstract

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often face problems in areas of social communication including negotiating with peers, entering ongoing interactions, and engaging in conflict resolution. A potential cause of these social communication difficulties is the decreased ability to make emotional inferences. This thesis investigates the effects of a social communication intervention on the ability of school-aged children with DLD to make inferences about emotions. Five children with DLD between the ages of 6;10 and 12;4 participated in a social communication intervention that highlighted principles of emotion understanding (recognizing emotions in facial expressions, inferring emotions with contextual information, and discussing reasoning behind emotions) using story books to illustrate concepts. Data were gathered before and after intervention using a psychometrically balanced measure of emotional inferencing ability. Results revealed notable improvements in three of the participants and consistent performance in two of the participants baseline to follow-up. While performance on the emotional inferencing task varied due to multiple factors, the participants that showed improvement produced real growth which encourages future research to be conducted.

Degree

MS

College and Department

David O. McKay School of Education; Communication Disorders

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2018-06-01

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd10154

Keywords

developmental language disorder, social communication, emotion understanding, social communication intervention, emotional inferencing

Language

english

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