Social Cognition in Adolescents with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD): Evidence from the Social Attribution Task.
Claire L Forrest, Vanessa Lloyd-Esenkaya, Jenny L Gibson and 1 others
PMID 35971042WHAT IT FOUND
Adolescents with developmental language disorder described a social animation with fewer emotional terms and missed key social cues compared to peers.
However, these social cognition scores did not predict parent-reported peer or emotional problems, suggesting the task measures language-linked interpretation rather than social difficulty directly.
Key findings
01The DLD group scored significantly lower on the Person, Salience, and ToM-Affective indices, identifying fewer social features and using fewer emotional words, but showed no significant difference on the Animation or ToM-Cognitive indices.
02While adolescents with DLD had significantly higher parent-rated peer and emotional problems, their performance on the social cognition task did not significantly predict these socioemotional difficulties once language and demographic factors were considered.
03Within the DLD group, expressive language ability predicted the ability to describe shapes as people, and receptive language predicted the identification of key social features, indicating that language skills drive performance on this specific task.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample size was small (53 participants), which reduced statistical power. The study excluded participants with autism spectrum disorder, so findings may not generalize to adolescents with both DLD and ASD. The social cognition task measures the ability to interpret others' actions in a passive video, not how the adolescent behaves in real social interactions. Groups differed in socioeconomic status and parental education, which were controlled for but may still confound results.
Declared interests
The authors declared no competing interests. The study was supported by a studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that adolescents with DLD have a specific deficit in theory of mind or social cognition that causes their peer problems. The study found that their performance on the social task was predicted by their language scores, and their social task scores did not predict their reported emotional or peer difficulties.