This exploratory research is aimed at studying facial emotion recognition abilities in deaf children and how they relate to linguistic skills and the characteristics of deafness. A total of 166 participants (75 deaf) aged 3-8 years were administered the following tasks: facial emotion recognition, naming vocabulary and cognitive ability. The children's teachers or speech therapists also responded to two questionnaires, one on children's linguistic-communicative skills and the other providing personal information. Results show a delay in deaf children's capacity to recognize some emotions (scared, surprised, and disgusted) but not others (happy, sad, and angry). Notably, they recognized emotions in a similar order to hearing children. Moreover, linguistic skills were found to be related to emotion recognition skills, even when controlling for age. We discuss the importance of facial emotion recognition of language, conversation, some characteristics of deafness, and parents' educational level.

This paper studies children’s capacity to understand that the emotions displayed in pretend play contexts do not necessarily correspond to internal emotions, and that pretend emotions may create false beliefs in an observer. A new approach is taken by asking children about pretend emotions in terms of pretence-reality instead of appearance-reality. A total of 37 four-year-olds and 33 six-year-olds were asked to participate in tasks where they had to pretend an emotion or where they were told stories in which the protagonists pretended an emotion. In each task children were asked: a) if the pretend emotion was real or just pretended and b) if an observer would think that the emotional expression was real or just pretended. Results showed that four-year-olds are capable of understanding that pretend emotions are not necessarily real. Overall, six-year-olds performed better than younger children. Furthermore, both age groups showed difficulty in understanding that pretend emotions might unintentionally mislead an observer. Results are discussed in relation to previous research on children’s ability to understand pretend play and the emotional appearance-reality distinction.

Many studies show a link between social cognition, a set of cognitive and emotional abilities applied to social situations, and executive functions in typical developing children. Children with Down syndrome (DS) show deficits both in social cognition and in some subcomponents of executive functions. However this link has barely been studied in this population. The aim of this study is to investigate the links between social cognition and executive functions among children with DS. We administered a battery of social cognition and executive function tasks (six theory of mind tasks, a test of emotion comprehension, and three executive function tasks) to a group of 30 participants with DS between 4 and 12 years of age. The same tasks were administered to a chronological-age control group and to a control group with the same linguistic development level. Results showed that apart from deficits in social cognition and executive function abilities, children with DS displayed a slight improvement with increasing chronological age and language development in those abilities. Correlational analysis suggested that working memory was the only component that remained constant in the relation patterns of the three groups of participants, being the relation patterns similar among participants with DS and the language development control group. A multiple linear regression showed that working memory explained above 50% of the variability of social cognition in DS participants and in language development control group, whereas in the chronological-age control group this component only explained 31% of the variability. These findings, and specifically the link between working memory and social cognition, are discussed on the basis of their theoretical and practical implications for children with DS. We discuss the possibility to use a working memory training to improve social cognition in this population.

This study examines the temporal effect of different trainings designed to favour the development of false belief understanding. A sample of 78 pre-school children aged between three years, five months and three years, 11 months was divided into three training conditions. After three training sessions, they were immediately evaluated in post-test 1 and again a month and a half later in post-test 2. The results showed that the efficiency of the training conditions depended both on the type of linguistic communication and on the use of deceptive objects. Also, the effect of the training was maintained for at least a month and a half after post-test 1 and it was transferred from the trained task to other false belief tasks. The results are commented according to the possibility of using language-based trainings to foster children's theory of mind understanding in educational contexts.

Here, we studied the beginnings of language development, jointly assessing two groups of precursors, sociodemographic and pre-linguistic, that have previously been studied separately. Thus, the general objective of this study was to explore which factors best explained the acquisition of initial expressive vocabulary. The sample consisted of 504 participants from Catalan-speaking homes with ages ranging between 10 and 18 months. The data were obtained through the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MCB-CDIs). Vocabulary development shows a lexical spurt at 17 months. Regression analyses show that pre-linguistic factors have more explanatory power of than sociodemographic ones. Within the sociodemographic variables, age, birth order and birth weight explain part of the vocabulary variance. With respect to pre-linguistic variables, imitation, late gestures and phrase comprehension are predictors of the initial vocabulary acquisition. Specifically, imitation and late gestures were the pre-linguistic behaviours that made it possible to distinguish between children with higher and lower levels of vocabulary. We discussed these findings in relation to their relevance for language acquisition and for the early assessment of linguistic competence.