The perception of nonverbal vocal cues of emotional meaning by language-disordered and normal children.

The purpose of this study was to compare language-disordered and normal children in terms of their ability to interpret emotional meaning from the vocal cues of an adult speaker. The findings indicated that language-disordered children were less accurate in identifying vocal cues of emotion than were normal children, although their pattern of errors was not significantly different. These findings are discussed in terms of Lubert's (1981) "acoustic feature theory" of language impairment, and suggestions for future research are advanced.