The Accurate Productions of Emotion Words During a Social Communication Intervention in Children with Language Impairment

• Main Author: Gibbons, Emily Marie
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2014
• Subjects: language impairment; school-age children; emotional competence; social competence; social communication intervention; emotion expression; emotion-based words; Communication Sciences and Disorders
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3837; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4836&context=etd

This thesis examines a social communication intervention that targets the emotional competence of children with language impairment (LI). Three elementary school-aged children with LI received twenty, 20-minute intervention sessions over four months. Each intervention session involved a combination of activities targeting emotion recognition and emotion inferencing. The emotion-based word productions were counted and analyzed. Categorized words belonged to the emotional categories of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. The percentage of appropriate usage was calculated to represent how often the participants used each emotion-based word in a semantically correct manner. Emotion word productions that did not match the intended target word were analyzed for valence agreement. Results were variable but two of the participants improved in the percentage of accurate productions in at least one emotional category while one participant did not improve over the intervention. Two of the participants also showed a decrease in the number of valence errors with no notable change in valence errors for the third participant. This suggests that this type of intervention can be effective in improving the use of emotion-based words in children with LI. More research is needed to develop this type of intervention.