Children with language impairment (LI) have demonstrated several language problems, including receptive and expressive deficits. A growing body of research has further demonstrated emotion understanding and, more specifically, emotion inferencing deficits that negatively affect the ability of this population to use language successfully in social interactions. Consequently, the present study examines social communication intervention focused on improving emotion inferencing for children with a diagnosis of LI or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as similar social communication deficits are occasionally seen in children with these diagnoses. Study participants were identified from the caseload of a practicing certified speech-language pathologist (SLP) and qualified for intervention based upon Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL) and Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT) scores. Participant ability to perform an emotion inferencing task was then compared pre- and post-treatment with descriptive statistics and presented as 6 individual case studies to determine the effectiveness of social communication intervention. Results are presented pre- and post-intervention and indicated that emotion inferencing capacities for a given scenario increased for some participants, while others demonstrated either modest gains or slight declines in performance after intervention.

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often have difficulties with social and emotional learning, including emotion understanding and inferencing. Five children with DLD, ages 6;4 to 11;9, identified emotions depicted in pictured scenarios over a period of 10 weeks. Emotion categories included happy, sad, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. Each child's responses were analyzed and plotted on a confusion matrix. In a few cases, children did not interpret the scenario accurately. Even when they interpreted the scenario accurately, all of the children misapplied, overgeneralized, or confused emotion labels in some cases. These errors represented limitations in social and emotional learning that could negatively impact the ability to interact with others, to establish and maintain relationships, and to succeed academically.