An Acquisition Study Of Pronouns And Reflexives In Mandarin-speaking Children With High-functioning Autism

Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD)is characterized as a developmental disorder with a remarkable feature of social and communication impairments.In recent years,due to the increasing population of autistic children,there has been increased emphasis on this population.The existing literature and studies in China mainly focus on language interventions or training,while less attention is paid to the study of the language acquisition or development of children with ASD,especially on their grammatical abilities.The current study aims to investigate the acquisition performance of Mandarin-speaking children with High-Functioning Autism(HFA)in acquiring pronouns and reflexives under the framework of Binding Theory.Two comparative experiments were carried out in order to probe into the differences between HFA children and Typically-Developing Age-matched(TDA)children in the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives.Two groups of subjects were selected to participate in this study.Twelve HFA children(aged 4;0-6;7)formed the experimental group while the control group was made up of twelve TDA children(aged 4;0-6;3)matched on age and gender.An Act-Out Task and a Picture-Selection Task were adopted in the first experiment to assess the subjects’ comprehension of pronouns and reflexives.An Elicited Production Task was employed in the second experiment to examine the subjects’ production of pronouns and reflexives.The data obtained from the two experiments was analyzed by SPSS 21.0.The results are as following.Compared with their TD age-matched peers,the HFA children perform worse in the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives.With respect to pronouns,the differences between the HFA children and the TDA children are significant in both comprehension and production experiments.Especially,clear differences are found in comprehension of the pronoun ta ‘he/she’ and production ofthe pronoun ni ‘you’.Their poor performance on the acquisition of pronouns can result from the Delay of Principle B Effect(DPBE)or pragmatic deficits.As for reflexives,a significant difference is revealed in the comprehension experiment,but not found in the production experiment.It is believed that the hypothesis put forward by Perovic et al.(2013a;2013b)is partially in support of the findings of the current study.According to Perovic et al.(2013a;2013b),Principle A is missing or incorrectly represented in the grammar of ASD children.Particularly,ASD children are deficit in the c-command of Principle A.They tend to adopt some linear rules to comprehend reflexives.The findings of the current study indicate that Principle A is not missing in Mandarin-speaking children with HFA since they have the knowledge of c-command but HFA children may adopt an incorrect pattern of Principle A to interpret reflexives.The current study is significant in both theoretical and practical terms.On the one hand,Binding Theory has never been investigated in Mandarin-speaking children with HFA before.Therefore,the current study is expected to fill this important gap in the literature by comparing autistic children with TD children in the acquisition of the grammatical items.On the other hand,gaining a better understanding of acquisition patterns of pronouns and reflexives in autistic children can lead to possible language interventions or treatments for these children.