Series Experimental Studies On Understanding Process Of Chinese Sentence In Autistic Spectrum Disorder Students

Research on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in China began in the early 80s, while the studies on ASDs' behavioral characteristics and early intervention have a just short 10 year history. The earliest children who were diagnosed as with autism have now been in the ages for elementary and middle school studying. Their teachers and parents are now concerning more and more about how the reading abilities of those with considerable potential for studying (especially with high functioning autism) are, and how to help them improve their reading ability so that to adapt better to their life in schools. Therefore, Chinese-speaking ASD students' reading comprehension is a topic worthy of more researches.Reading Comprehension (the reading of written materials in particular) bases on the acquisition of vocabulary and language ability (especially written language). Due to the small size of children who were diagnosed as with autism in Shanghai in 80s, especially the few number of high-functioning autism, this dissertation focuses on sentence reading comprehension, using series cognitive experiments, to explore the Chinese-speaking ASD students' sentence processing model, the role of verbs in their sentence understanding, their processing on personal pronouns mainly.This dissertation is divided into four parts.Part I, as the literature study, sorts out the ASDs' reading comprehension, Chinese sentence reading, and other topics retaled researches, and states the background of the present research topic; and the research idea and design of this dissertation is presented: to explore ASDs' model of the sentence reading comprehension, examine the roles of two sentence compositions - verb and pronouns in their sentence understanding through series of experiments.As the core of this dissertation, Part II is the experimental research, including three series.Series 1, using 5 comparative experiments, studies ASDs' processing characteristics of Chinese simple sentences inputed through auditory and visual channels to try to fiture out the model of their Chinese simple sentence processing. The results are as following: (1) The semantics in the main influencing factor to ASDs' understanding of Chinese simple sentences input through auditory channel; (2) The word order has a more significant impact on ASDs' understanding of Chinese simple sentences input through visual channel than semantics; (3) Sentence structure does not have a significant influence on ASDs' understanding of Chinese simple sentences.Series 2, through a computer programming experiment and two eye tracking experiments examines the role of verb in ASDs' Chinese sentence understanding, and study the effect of vocabulary information of verb on their sentence understanding. The results are as following: (1) The relationship between verb and its direct object (matching rule violated or not) affects the ASDs' reaction times significantly; (2) The same as on mentally retarded group, the sentence continuity, decided by the combining of verb and following noun/adject, has a significant influence on ASDs' reading process and reaction time, indicating that the vocabulary information of verb is involved at the early stage of ASDs' sentence reading.Series 3, through comparative studies examines ASDs' pronoun processing in Chinese compound sentences. The results show that: (1) When there is a clear semantics preference, the semantics of the sentence is the main affecting factor to ASDs' Pronoun antecedent identification, which has stronger influence than the syntax position of the pronoun; (2) When there is no clear semantics preference, the location effect- recency effects is shown.Part III, as the general discussion and summary, summarizes the following conclusions on the characteristics of Chinese-speaking ASDs' understanding of Chinese sentence on the basis of the liturature study and experimental research:(1) An obvious tendency of modularization is shown in ASDs' understanding of Chinese simple sentences, which verifies ASDs' modular theory of their cognition and related Weak Central Coherence hypothesis further;(2) The role of syntactic and semantic factors in ASDs' modularized processing of simple Chinese sentences mainly depends on the nature of experimental materials and the stimulus input channel;(3) Propositional representation is the main representation form in ASDs' sentence processing, and the choosing of sentence processing strategies depends on experimental materials and tasks; (4) The vocabulary information of verb has immediate effect and activation effect in ASDs' processing of simple Chinese sentences, which indicates the lexical-driven model;(5) The effectiveness of ASDs' pronoun processing in compound Chinese sentences relies more on the semantic clarity of the sentences, which suggests further that their abstracting ability is the weak link in their studying.In Part VI, the following suggestions on Chinese teaching and reading comprehension instruction to Chinese-speaking ASDs are provided based on the conclusions in Part HI: (1) enhance the studying of social emotional vocabulary, and their roles in sentences; (2) emphasize the training of integrating semantic and grammatical factors to understand sentences, help ASDs master expressions with different syntactic structures for the same semantics and the conversion between, and use same syntax in different situations; (3) use teaching methods related to different input channels or their combinations to train ASDs propositional representation of reading materials; (4) during vocabulary teaching, especially verb teaching, the explicit explanations of vocabulary information is necessary, and training on knowing the roles of vocabulary information in sentences and texts should be stressed; (5) strengthen the learning of concepts, especially abstract concepts, to improve their ability of abstract thinking with concepts; (6) do the training of reading within context to improve ASDs' reasoning ability according to the context.More studies can be developed in the following fields: cognitive neuroscience researches on ASDs' Chinese sentence understanding and processing, ASDs' text comprehension researches, reading comprehension researches of ASDs in different functioning levels, intervention researches on ASDs' reading comprehension.