Patterns of development of ToM-emotion abilities in intellectually disabled (ID) children and typically developing (TD) children matched on their developmental age were investigated. The links between cognition, language, social understanding and ToM-emotion abilities were examined. EDEI-R (Perron-Borelli, M. (1996). "Echelles Differentielles d'Efficiences Intellectuelles. Forme Revisee (EDEI-R)". Paris: Editions et Applications Psychologiques) was used to match participants and to assess social understanding. ECOSSE (Lecocq, P. (1996). "L'E.CO.S.SE. Une epreuve de comprehension syntaxico-semantique". Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion) assessed the level of syntactic and semantic comprehension of French speaking, to ensure a good comprehension of the questions in ToM-emotion tasks. Adapted tasks of the understanding of causes and consequences of emotions (Quintal, G. (2001). "La comprehension des emotions chez les enfants d'age prescolaire dans le cadre d'une theorie de l'esprit". Un-published master's thesis, University of Montreal, Quebec) assessed ToM-emotion abilities (Nader-Grosbois, N., Thirion-Marissiaux, A.-F., & Grosbois, M. (2003). "Adapted tests for assessment of the Theory of Mind of causes and consequences of emotions (unpublished documents)". Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). Similarities in the development of ToM-emotion abilities and social understanding were found, respectively, in both groups (delay hypothesis in ID participants). Some differences between groups were observed in the links between social understanding and ToM-emotion abilities. Significant correlations between developmental characteristics (verbal and non-verbal cognition) and ToM-emotion abilities were obtained for both groups. Verbal cognition explained an important part of the variance of ToM results (understanding of causes and consequences of emotions). The impact of chronological age on ToM-emotion abilities was also examined and is discussed. (Contains 7 tables.)