The Association between Parent and Child-Report Measures of Alexithymia in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

Accurate measures of alexithymia, an inability to recognise and describe one’s own emotions, that are suitable for children are crucial for research into alexithymia’s development. However, previous research suggests that parent versus child reports of alexithymia do not correlate. Potentially, children may report on the awareness of their emotions, whereas parent-report measures may re-flect children’s verbal expression of emotion, which may be confounded by children’s communi-cative abilities, especially in conditions such as Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Given theoretical arguments that alexithymia may develop due to language impairments, further re-search into alexithymia in DLD is also needed. This project examined parent and child report measures of alexithymia in children with DLD (n = 106) and without DLD (n = 183), and their as-sociation to children’s communication skills. Parent and child reports were not significantly corre-lated in either group, and children with DLD had higher alexithymia scores on the parent-report measure only. Thus, parent and child measures of alexithymia likely reflect different constructs. Pragmatic language problems related to more parent-reported alexithymia, over and above group membership. Structural language abilities were unrelated to alexithymia. We suggest decreased social learning opportunities, rather than a language measure artefact, underlie increased alexi-thymic difficulties in DLD.