Study On The Pronoun Processing Ability Of Chinese High-functioning Autistic Children

Comprehending and producing pronouns are important pragmatic skills in language acquisition. Many studies have investigated the production of pronouns in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Little is known about how they comprehend and process third-person pronouns. Third-person pronouns have no fixed reference; rather, reference depends on context. Pronoun processing requires listeners to use discourse information and select the appropriate referent quickly and accurately.The current study is aimed to explore how the Mandarin-speaking children with High-functioning autism (HFA) use order-of-mention, verb implicit causality and prosodic cues to process pronouns. In addition, we examined the connections between pronoun competence and Theory of Mind (ToM).Eighteen Mandarin-speaking children with HFA and eighteen typically developing children (ages 5-7) participated in this study, which were matched by chronological age, total IQ, verbal IQ, performance IQ and Verbal working memory span. We designed four computer-based experiments including three pronoun comprehension tasks and the false belief tasks. The pronoun comprehension tasks tested how children use order-of-mention, verb implicit causality and prosodic cues to find the referent of the pronoun. The false belief tasks were used to assess theory of mind.The findings showed that children with HFA performed significantly worse on three pronoun processing tasks than typically developing children, indicating that Mandarin-speaking children with HFA have difficulty in comprehending third-person pronouns. We argued that they don’t know that pronoun should refer to a prominent entity in the preceding discourse or they cannot distinguish which one is more prominent.By testing several cues in the same participants, we found out that both children with HFA and typically developing children performed well when they used the verb implicit causality to clarify the referent of a pronoun with the support of context. The context helped the participant establish the discourse coherence. But without the support of context, children with HFA couldn’t use the verb semantics to process the pronouns. What’s more, they showed no sensitivity to order-of-mention and prosodic cues like typically developing children did. Children with HFA only acquired the most reliable cue at this age.In the ToM tasks, children with HFA performed worse than typically developing children. But the Spearman’s correlation findings showed no correlation between theory of mind task success and the accuracy of pronoun processing. Theory of Mind ability did not influence the pronoun comprehension.