Improving facial emotion recognition in children with developmental language disorder: Intentional or incidental training?

BACKGROUND: Children with Developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulties in developing age-appropriate expressive and receptive language skills. Reflecting the role of language in cognition, many children with DLD also experience difficulties in social cognition and learning. Specifically, challenges in facial emotion recognition, which is believed to be largely learned incidentally and even implicitly, are often reported. However, it remains unclear whether interventions aimed at improving this ability should be based on incidental, intentional, or a combination of both learning approaches. AIMS: This study compared the effectiveness of a single-session training focused on intentional learning (IntL), incidental learning (IncL), or a combination of both (COMB). METHOD: Children with DLD (N = 49; aged 9 -12 years) initially completed a facial emotion recognition task (ERT). Each child was then assigned to one of the three training conditions, which involved faces of different individuals displaying the two emotions most frequently confused during the ERT. The training required participants to match either the identity or emotional expression of faces showing the target emotions at 50 % intensity with those expressing the emotions at 100 % intensity. The conditions varied in the instructions provided, promoting either incidental or intentional learning. OUTCOMES: The post-training ERT revealed a significant reduction in incorrect recognition of the two most confused emotions in the COMB condition and particularly in the IncL condition. No significant reduction was observed in the IntL condition. IMPLICATIONS: These results support the potential -and perhaps even superiority- of training methods based on incidental associative learning for enhancing facial emotion recognition in children with DLD.