Emotion regulation in children and adolescents with developmental language disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Authors

Angélica Mateus-Moreno, Jorge-Luis Guirado-Moreno, Raül López-Penadés, Eva Aguilar-Mediavilla, Daniel Adrover-Roig

Published in

Child development. Aug 06, 2026. Epub Aug 06, 2026.

Abstract

This systematic review and meta-analysis provides the first comprehensive synthesis of research on emotion regulation (ER) in children and adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD), based on 16 independent samples (NDLD = 1,616; ages 5-16). Individuals with DLD showed significantly greater ER difficulties than typically developing peers, representing a medium effect size (g = 0.563). This effect remained statistically significant, although reduced to a small-to-medium effect size, in sensitivity analyses excluding studies from the same research group (g = 0.317). Informant discrepancies emerged, with teachers reporting more ER difficulties than parents and children's self-reports. No clear evidence of publication bias was observed on formal testing; however, converging evidence from small-study effects, risk of bias analyses, and publication year trends suggests that the observed effect size may represent an overestimate of the true effect. These findings underscore the need for more rigorous, theory-driven, multi-method research to accurately estimate the magnitude of ER difficulties in DLD.

PMID:
42560654
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 06 Aug 2026.

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