The emotion understanding of children with language impairment (LI) was examined in two studies employing emotion-recognition tasks selected to minimize reliance on language skills. Participants consisted of 43 children with LI and 43 typically developing, age-matched peers, sampled from the age ranges of 5 to 8 and 9 to 12 years. In the first study, participants were shown photographs of faces (Matsumoto & Ekman, 1988) and asked to indicate what emotion was being expressed. In the second study, participants listened to excerpts of classical music and indicated what emotion was being expressed. Children with LI identified the facial expressions of happiness, anger, sadness, and fear with the same accuracy as typical children. They were significantly less accurate than their peers at identifying surprise and disgust. Age differences were observed on anger and surprise, with the younger group performing more poorly than the older group. Children with LI also showed significant differences from typical children in identifying the emotion expressed in music excerpts. Significant differences between the performances of the younger and older groups were also found.
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