Relation between paralinguistic skills and social skills in adults with mild and moderate intellectual disability

Abstract

Facial expressions and prosodic acoustic characteristics jointly present paralinguistic features of communication. By analyzing literature, we observe that respondents with intellectual disabilities manifest emphasized difficulties in detecting emotions in tasks of facial and vocal expression. However, we do not know if there are data on how paralinguistic abilities correlate with social skills in adults with intellectual disabilities. This research was conducted in order to determine the relation between the ability of paralinguistic production and paralinguistic understanding, on one side, and social skills on the other side. The sample consisted of 44 adults of both genders with mild (N=22) and moderate intellectual disabilities (N=22), aged between 20 and 50 (M=32.41, SD=9.36). The Paralinguistic scale from the battery for the assessment of communication (The Assessment Battery for Communication, Abaco, Sacco et al., 2008) was used for the assessment of paralinguistic skills, and three subscales of Vineland adaptive behavior scale - teaching form (Sparrow, Cicchetti & Balla, 2006) were used for the assessment of social skills. The results show that the achievement on subscales of Playing and leisure time positively correlated with the ability to understand emotions in communication (r = 0.486, p < 0.05) in respondents with mild intellectual disability. Achievements on the subscales Skills of adapting had a moderate and positive correlation with the ability to understand emotions in communication (r=0.522, p<0.05) in subjects with mild intellectual disability. Statistically significant correlations between the examined variables were not observed in the group of respondents with moderate intellectual disability. We can conclude that in adults with mild intellectual disability the ability to understand emotional paralinguistic elements significantly correlates with the ability to organize social activities and to adapt behavior in social interactions.