The Role of Language Skill in Child Psychopathology: Implications for Intervention in the Early Years Karen Salmon 1 • Richard O’Kearney 2 • Elaine Reese 3 • Clare-Ann Fortune 1 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Abstract In this narrative review, we suggest that chil- dren’s language skill should be targeted in clinical inter- ventions for children with emotional and behavioral difficulties in the preschool years. We propose that lan- guage skill predicts childhood emotional and behavioral problems and this relationship may be mediated by chil- dren’s self-regulation and emotion understanding skills. In the first sections, we review recent high-quality longitudi- nal studies which together demonstrate that that children’s early language skill predicts: (1) emotional and behavioral problems, and this relationship is stronger than the reverse pattern; (2) self-regulation skill; this pattern may be stronger than the reverse pattern but moderated by child age. Findings also suggest that self-regulation skill medi- ates the relation between early language skill and chil- dren’s emotional and behavioral problems. There is insufficient evidence regarding the mediating role of emotion understanding. In subsequent sections, we review evidence demonstrating that: (1) particular kinds of developmentally targeted parent–child conversations play a vital role in the development of language skill, and (2) some current clinical interventions, directly or indirectly, have a beneficial impact on children’s vocabulary and narrative skills, but most approaches are ad hoc. Targeting language via parent–child conversation has the potential to improve the outcomes of current clinical interventions in the preschool years. Keywords Language Á Child Á Parent–child conversation Á Psychopathology Á Self-regulation Á Emotion competence Á Clinical intervention Overview The development of language is a critical task in the early years of life. Language is a gateway to children’s cognitive and socioemotional competences, including their ability to understand and manage emotions and behavior (Astington and Baird 2005; Goldin-Meadow et al. 2014; Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2015; Nelson 2007). Children who have not achieved age-appropriate language proficiency are at increased risk of difficulty in language-related cognitive and socioemo- tional tasks, and of enduring and escalating emotional and behavioral problems (Masten and Cicchetti 2010). There is, however, considerable diversity in the quality and rate of young children’s acquisition of skilled language use. This diversity in turn is closely linked to differences in the quantity and quality of language to which children are exposed (Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2015; Rowe 2015). Thus, the level of children’s language skill and the nature of the conversations that they experience in their early years potentially have important implications for all aspects of their psychological development. Improving language skills, via parent–child conversation, may promote chil- dren’s competence in a broad range of skills related to psychological well-being and reduce the development of psychopathology (Bohlmann et al. 2015; Shonkoff and Fisher 2013). & Karen Salmon karen.salmon@vuw.ac.nz 1 School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Parade, PO Box 600, Wellington 6012, New Zealand 2 Research School of Psychology, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia 3 Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand 123 Clin Child Fam Psychol Rev DOI 10.1007/s10567-016-0214-1