Die Verarbeitung von Emotionsbegriffen und emotionalen Gesichtsausdrücken bei Kindern mit unauffälligem Spracherwerb und Kindern mit Sprachentwicklungsstörung

Emotions are significantly involved in interpersonal communication and the shaping of relationships. Successful communication includes the ability to convey and interpret emotions verbally and nonverbally - central skills from the interacting areas of linguistic and socio-emotional competence. Obtaining deeper knowledge about developmental characteristics in children's acquisition of such core competencies is of high scientific and social relevance. The present cumulative dissertation describes three consecutive studies in which the processing of emotion terms and emotional facial expressions were investigated in children with typical language acquisition and children with developmental language disorder between the ages of 5 and 12. They comprised a valence rating and arousal rating with emotion terms, two verbal and one nonverbal emotion categorization experiment, and a nonverbal control task. The results indicate the existence of age effects and effects of language skills on emotion processing: (1) an adult-like ability to assess valence and arousal levels in nine-year-olds, (2) an age-dependent increase in the processing performance of emotion terms, characterized by an alternation of developmental and plateau phases, (3) an age-dependent decrease of a processing advantage of positive over negative emotion terms, and (4) deficits not only in verbal but also in nonverbal emotion categorization in children with developmental language disorder. The research findings are discussed in light of current language and emotion research. They provide further evidence for the existence of a strong interaction of language and emotion processing and support the core idea of the Theory of Constructed Emotions (Feldman Barrett, 2017). According to this theory, language competence is a crucial ingredient for the acquisition and processing of emotion concepts. Of particular relevance are practical implications which can be derived from the results. They concern the use of multimodal emotional content in the future design of clinical speech and language interventions.