| As a common neurodevelopmental disorder,autism spectrum disorder has obstacles in social communication,language communication and so on.Some researchers think that this may be related to the defect of the group's theory of mind(TOM).TOM mainly involves the individual's understanding of self or others' mental states,such as intentions,desires,and beliefs,and inferences about the behavior of others based on these understandings.Previous studies have shown that there is a close relationship between sentential complements and TOM,because that sentence can allow a proposition or sentence to be nested in another sentence,and the truth of the proposition does not affect the truth value of the entire sentence.Researchers such as de Villiers believe that the sentential complements provide a thinking framework for the representation of the TOM,which helps children understand the beliefs of others.However,other researchers believe that this syntax has no unique effect on the understanding of the TOM.What is the relationship between sentential complements and TOM for Chinese children with autism? Can this syntax promote the understanding of TOM in children with autism? This is of great significance for revealing the representation of the TOM of autistic children and understanding the mental state of others.Therefore,based on the existing results,this study systematically explores the relationship between sentential complements and the TOM of autistic children through cross-sectional research methods and training research methods.By comparing the similarities and differences between children with autism and typical developmental children in this relationship,we reveal potential representational ways of the TOM of children with autism.There are three parts to this research:The first part is a literature review that first explains autism and theory of mind concepts,related theoretical models,and research paradigms.Next,the relationship between language and theory of mind and the influence of task language forms in the understanding of theory of mind in autism were sorted out.Then,the domestic and international studies on the relationship between sentential complements and theory of mind were analyzed.Finally,based on the above analysis,the questions and research ideas for this study were proposed.The second part is an experimental study with three studies,Study 1 examines the relationship between sentential complements and TOM of children with autism from the sentence level.There are two experiments.Experiment 1 examined the effect of different structural types of sentential complements on the TOM of children with autism and typical developmental children with language ability matching.The results of the study showed that the syntactic comprehension ability of clause structure sentential complements and verb phrase structure sentential complements in children with autism were significantly weaker than that in typical developmental children.The scores of autistic children were significantly lower than those of typical developmental children in both verbal and non-verbal forms of TOM.Under the task of non-verbal theory of mind,autism can represent TOM through the verb phrase structure sentential complements and clause structure sentential complements in the verbal TOM task,only the clause structure sentential complements explained the theory of mind.This shows that with the improvement of the language requirements of TOM tasks,the syntax of autistic children's representation becomes more complex.Typical developmental children only use sentencen structure s to represent the TOM in verb tasks.This suggests that there are different representations in TOM between typical developmental children and children with autism.Experiment 2 investigated the influence of semantic factors of sentential complements on the TOM of children with autism and children with language ability matching.The results showed that the comprehension ability of consistent and inconsistent sentential complements of children with autism was weaker than that of typical developmental children.In both verbal and non-verbal TOM,the inconsistent sentential complements can significantly predict TOM.Children with autism were able to understand TOM through syntactic knowledge of complement sentences,but only in non-verbal tasks.When the language requirement of TOM task is higher,children with autism need to integrate the syntactic and semantic knowledge of sentential complements to understand the TOM.Study 1 not only supports the view of de Villiers et al from the sentence level,but also provides evidence for children with autism to represent the TOM through social-cognitive components such as language.Based on Study 1,Study 2 explored the effect of sentential complements on the TOM of children with autism from the perspective of predicate verbs,which is also divided into two experiments.Experiment 3 analyzes the effects of different types of predicate verbs on the relationship between sentential complements and TOM.The results showed that the ability of children with autism to comprehend and process sentential complements with communicative verbs and sensory verbs did not differ significantly from typical developmental children with the same language ability,but significantly lagged behind typical developmental children with the same age.The sentential complements with communicative verbs could predict the verbal TOM in children autism and typical developmental children.Compared to the mental verbal,the sentential complements with communicative verbs had a greater predictive effect.Sentential complements with sensory verbs had no significant predictive effect on TOM.This suggests that the relationship between the complement sentences and TOM is affected by factors such as the type of the predicate of sentential complements.Experiment 4 examined the effect of different lexical meanings of predicate verbs,and the results showed that children with autism did not differ significantly from language-ability-matched normal children in factive and non-factive sentential complements.However,they significantly lagged behind language-ability-matched,age-matched typical developmental children on the counter-factive complement sentences task.Children with autism performed best on the task of comprehension of factive sentential complements,followed by the non-factive task,while the two groups of normal children were on the contrary.This shows that autistic children and typical developmental children have different characteristics in the comprehension of sentential complements with three lexical meanings.The counter-factive sentential complements could significantly predict the verbal and non-verbal TOM in children with autism;when the language requirements of the TOM are,the factual sentential complements could also predict the TOM.Only counter-factual sentential complements predicted verbal TOM in typical developmental children.The second study further confirms the influence of the sentential complements on the theory of mind from the level of the predicate verb type and word meaning,and also reveals to a certain extent that there are different representations of the autistic children and normal children in the theory of mind.Study 2 further confirms the influence of sentential complements on TOM at the level of predicative verb types and lexical meanings,and also reveals to some extent that there are different representations of TOM in children with autism and typical developmental children.Based on the results of Studies 1 and 2 and the existing studies,Study 3 used training study to further investigate the role of sentential complements in facilitating the development of TOM in children with autism.In experiment 5,four groups of autistic children with similar non-verbal intelligence and language comprehension abilities received the syntactic structure intervention of the sentential complements,the semantic intervention,the counter-factive verb and semantic intervention of the sentential complements,and the simple sentence intervention.The results of the study showed that all three sentential complements interventions improved children's TOM performance;the counter-factual verb combined with semantic intervention had the most significant promotion effect;the impact of the semantic intervention was better than that of syntactic structure intervention,and the improvement of children's sentential complements ability in autism required specialized intervention,which could not be generalized from the general language intervention.The third part is a comprehensive discussion,which first discussed the influence of sentential complements on TOM in children with autism from the perspective of grammatical components.Secondly,the relationship was further elaborated from the perspective of semantic components,and discusses the applicability of social-cognitive components such as language in the understanding of TOM in Chinese children with autism.Finally,it points out the clinical implications of this study in the language rehabilitation for children with autism,the shortcomings that emerged during the study,and the directions that could be further explored in future research were pointed out.The innovation of this research: the relationship between sentential complements and TOM of children with autism was systematically explored,revealing the representation of TOM of children with autism to some extent,and provided evidence support for the social-cognitive components of the TOM.The intervention research was used to further investigate the effect of sentential complements on the comprehension of complements and the development of TOM in children with autism.It supports the theoretical viewpoint that the sentential complements promote the development of TOM,and provides a reference for the clinical intervention of language in children with autism. |
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