Today we have @SarahGriff90 discussing her recently published paper 'Early language competence, but not general cognitive ability, predicts children’s recognition of emotion from facial and vocal cues'.

Although most children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) do not develop mental health problems, they are at greater risk compared to their typically developing peers.

If we want to intervene to minimise this risk, we need to understand why DLD is associated with poorer mental health.

One possibility we are exploring in SCALES is that poor language reduces the ability to recognise and reason about emotions, which in turn increases risk of mental ill health.

Our first step to testing this theory was to test whether early language competence predicts emotion recognition (ER).