Emotion Regulation and Pragmatic Language Skills in Developmental Language Disorder and Typical Development

Introduction: Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects the learning, expression and comprehension of language. Children diagnosed with DLD may experience difficulties in peer relationships, display behavioral problems, or encounter challenges in social-emotional development due to inadequacies in their pragmatic language skills. This study aims to evaluate the emotion regulation and pragmatic language skills of 60- to 72-month-old children with DLD those with Typical Language Development (TLD), and to examine the relationship between these two skills. Method: Seventeen (1 girl; 16 boys) children diagnosed with DLD and 26 (15 girls, 11 boys) children with TLD aged 60-72 months were included in the study. Data were collected face-to-face using the “Participant Information Form”, “Preschool Emotion Regulation Scale (PERS)” and “Pragmatic Language Skills Inventory Turkish Version (PDBE-TV)”. The data were analyzed using IBM SPSS 27.0 for Windows. Findings: It was found that children diagnosed with TLD had lower performance in emotion regulation (p = .000) and pragmatic language skills (p = .000) compared to children with TLD. No significant correlation was found between emotion regulation and pragmatic language skills in the group diagnosed with DLD (r = -.083, p = .753) or in the group with TLD (r = .081, p = .694). Discussion: No significant relationship was found between emotion regulation and pragmatic language skills in children with DLD and TLD. Although this result is consistent with some previous studies, the absence of a direct link between language skills and emotion regulation may be due to various factors. These may include unmeasured mediating variables, limitations in the sensitivity of the assessment tools, or the sample size and demographic characteristics. Conclusion and Recommendations: Children with DLD performed significantly lower than their TLD peers in both emotion regulation and pragmatic language skills. However, no significant relationship was found between these two skills in either group. This finding suggests that various cognitive, social, and environmental factors may contribute to the development of emotion regulation and pragmatic abilities. Future studies should consider potential mediating variables such as executive functions, social environmental influences, and parental attitudes to better understand possible indirect associations between these domains. Furthermore, the development of individualized and multicomponent intervention programs for children with DLD may provide a comprehensive approach to support both their language and emotional-behavioral development.