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Abstract: Emotional competence (EC) refers to a set of skills to identify, understand, and respond to one's own emotions and those of others. It plays a fundamental role in socialization processes, where children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and specific language impairment (SLI) show marked deficits. However, due to the similarities between these two conditions, it is difficult to establish a differential diagnosis at early ages. A literature search of the WOS, SCOPUS, and Proquest databases was conducted. Year of publication (from 2000 to 2019), type of paper (reviews, meta-analyses, and experimental studies), language (English), and age of participants (children up to 13 years) were applied as inclusion criteria. Based upon these criteria, 34 papers were included in this review. Results revealed that children with ASD showed impairments in facial emotion recognition, whereas those with SLI showed difficulties in emotion recognition in auditory and audiovisual modalities. Results also highlighted that both children with ASD and SLI showed biases towards the recognition of positive emotions.
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and specific language impairment (SLI) have traditionally been regarded as distinct conditions given that the compromised language areas were often well-differentiated: Whereas pragmatic language function was impaired in ASD, structural language functions (e.g. phonology, morphology, or syntax) were compromised in SLI. However, given the significant heterogeneity of both populations, ample evidence has suggested a potential overlap between disorders, either because of the greater functional language disorders in ASD individuals that resemble SLI or the marked social difficulties in SLI individuals that resemble ASD traits (Taylor et al., 2014, 2015). Furthermore, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ofMental Disorders (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013) the high frequency with which ASD and SLI co-occur indicates a high comorbidity between conditions, which makes it difficult to differentiate them.
There are two main lines to explain the cooccurrence of ASD and SLI. Some evidence supports a shared etiology, while a second theory holds that similarities between disorders are superficial and cannot support the unification of diagnoses (for a review, see Taylor et al., 2012). Given its impact on clinical practice, more research is needed to obtain substantive evidence of the relationship and differences between conditions (Taylor et al., 2012, 2014, 2015).
Emotional Competence
Traditionally, studies that involved these...