The Effects of a Social Communication Intervention on the Correct Production of Emotion Words for Children with Language Impairment

• Main Author: Hetherton, Julia Vincent
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2018
• Subjects: language impairment; social communication intervention; emotional intelligence; emotion understanding; emotional competence; school-age children; emotion-based words; Communication Sciences and Disorders
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/6778; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7778&context=etd

Many school-age children with language impairment (LI) have difficulties with aspects of social and emotional learning. This study was structured to evaluate one aspect of the effectiveness of a social communication intervention, the appropriate production of emotion words. Four school-aged children with LI participated in 20 sessions of story-based intervention targeting understanding and usage of emotion-based words. Emotions targeted included the emotion word categories of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. Because the knowledge of the emotion word categories varied from child to child, each child had different target words. The percentage of correct production of targeted emotion word categories was tracked, recorded and presented in figure format. The percentage of correct productions provided an estimation of the participants' usage and understanding of emotion-based words from session to session. Percentage of nonoverlapping data (PND) for each participant (subdivided by emotion) was calculated where appropriate as one measure of the effectiveness of the intervention. Although somewhat variable, the data showed that the children did make progress in their use of some of the emotion word categories that they did not understand at baseline. The results of the study present some promising preliminary findings.