The Relationship of Language and Emotion Regulation Skills to Reticence in Children With Specific Language Impairment

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between emotion regulation, language ability, and reticent behavior in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their typical peers. Participants included 43 children with SLI and 43 typically developing children, for a total sample of 86 participants. Children were selected from 2 age ranges: 5–8 years and 9–12 years. The Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC; A. Shields & D. Cicchetti, 1997, 1998) and the Teacher Behavior Rating Scale (TBRS; C. H. Hart & C. C. Robinson, 1996) were completed by each child’s teacher to provide measures of emotion regulation and reticence, respectively. The Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL; E. Carrow-Woodfolk, 1999) was administered to provide a measure of language ability. A regression analysis including all participants indicated that the emotion regulation scores and the CASL scores were significant predictors of the reticence scores, accounting for 43% of the variance. Group-specific analyses were then conducted to determine whether the 2 predictor scales differentially predicted reticence based on language and age groups. None of the tests exceeded the.05 level, indicating that there was no significant difference in predictive power on the 2 factors in question. KEY WORDS: emotion regulation, language impairment, reticence, withdrawal, socioemotional