Several studies have shown deficits in emotion recognition in children with Down syndrome (DS). However, most of these studies required the understanding of verbal labels of emotion in their instructions, which may have been a disadvantage for these children, given their common language difficulties. This study addressed this issue by investigating the abilities of children with DS to recognize emotion from emotional terms, using the same visual material as in a previous nonverbal study with which they had no difficulty. Their performance was compared to that of typically developing children (TD) and children with nonspecific intellectual disability (NSID) of the same developmental age, during a 3-year longitudinal follow-up. Results showed that the abilities of children with DS were significantly poorer and developed slower than those of TD children, but not children with NSID. These cross-sectional and longitudinal data tend to show that children with DS have a lack of understanding of emotional verbal labels. The implications of these findings for future emotion recognition studies in these children, notably the need to design nonverbal experiments using dynamic stimuli, are discussed. The consequences of a potential deficit affecting the emotional lexicon are also raised with a view to orienting therapeutic and educational support.
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