The Role of Language Skill in Child Psychopathology: Implications for Intervention in the Early Years

Abstract

In this narrative review, we suggest that children's language skill should be targeted in clinical interventions for children with emotional and behavioral difficulties in the preschool years. We propose that language skill predicts childhood emotional and behavioral problems and this relationship may be mediated by children's self-regulation and emotion understanding skills. In the first sections, we review recent high-quality longitudinal studies which together demonstrate that that children's early language skill predicts: (1) emotional and behavioral problems, and this relationship is stronger than the reverse pattern; (2) self-regulation skill; this pattern may be stronger than the reverse pattern but moderated by child age. Findings also suggest that self-regulation skill mediates the relation between early language skill and children's emotional and behavioral problems. There is insufficient evidence regarding the mediating role of emotion understanding. In subsequent sections, we review evidence demonstrating that: (1) particular kinds of developmentally targeted parent-child conversations play a vital role in the development of language skill, and (2) some current clinical interventions, directly or indirectly, have a beneficial impact on children's vocabulary and narrative skills, but most approaches are ad hoc. Targeting language via parent-child conversation has the potential to improve the outcomes of current clinical interventions in the preschool years.

Low Emotional Awareness as a Transdiagnostic Mechanism Underlying Psychopathology in Adolescence

“…Indeed, childhood adversity, including violence exposure, is associated with problems identifying and differentiating between emotions (Pears & Fisher, 2005;Shenk, Putnam, & Noll, 2013), which may be attributable to less frequent use of emotional words and poorer scaffolding of emotional concepts and experiences by parents (Denham, Mitchell-Copeland, Strandberg, Auerbach, & Blair, 1997;Pollak, Cicchetti, Hornung, & Reed, 2000;Salmon, O'Kearney, Reese, & Fortune, 2016). Children exposed to violence become particularly attuned to the detection of anger at the expense of differentiating between other negative emotions (Pollak et al, 2000;Pollak & Sinha, 2002;Shenk et al, 2013).…”

Increasing verbal knowledge mediates development of multidimensional emotion representations

“…24 Hence, insight into how emotion concepts develop may shed light on the origin of these individual differences and potentially aid early detection of later psychopathology. 25 Here, we directly assessed the development of emotion concept representations as well as mechanisms through which these representations evolve. We focused on four potential mediators identified in extant literature: verbal knowledge, fluid reasoning, the general ability to represent stimuli bidimensionally, and low-level task behaviors (e.g., using extremes of rating scales).…”

“…The clinical implications of these findings deserve further attention. 11 , 25 Third, if multidimensional emotion concept representations are indeed important to healthy development, are there interventions that could facilitate this process? Studies demonstrate that educating both children and their parents about emotion can augment emotion understanding, 39 so interventions (particularly those that augment verbal knowledge) may indeed boost this normative developmental process.…”

Education of staff in preschool aged classrooms in child care centers and child outcomes: A meta-analysis and systematic review

“…It is important to note that since much of the variability in child outcomes is driven by child and family factors, even small effects associated with ECEC programs, particularly when family factors are accounted for, may be meaningful. This is especially true when language is the outcome as it has been shown that effects on language outcome can have long lasting effects [ 83 ] that spillover into multiple domains of a child’s life including social, emotional and cognitive outcomes [ 84 , 85 ]. The finding that staff education is associated only with language outcomes may reflect recent emphasis on language in literacy in ECEC staff training programs or it may reflect the predispositions of the individuals who are drawn to careers in ECEC settings, who may be more oriented towards language than math.…”