The Acquisition Of The Bei-Construction In Mandarin-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

Studies abroad have shown that children with Specific Language Impairment(SLI) have difficulty in the acquisition of passive structures. The acquisition is often delayed or even defective. There is only one study exploring Mandarin-speaking SLI children’s acquisition of passives in mainland China, and no study has thus far approached the issue using spontaneous data. The reported study made use of spontaneous data, aimed to find the difference in the acquisition of the beiconstruction between SLI children and typically developing children and the characteristics of SLI children’s production.The data used in the study are from 36 Mandarin-speaking children, including 12 SLI children, 12 typically-developing age matched(TDA) children, and 12 typicallydeveloping younger(TDY) children. The three groups of children were guided to complete a free talk task and a story telling task and in this way the spontaneous production were recorded in the form of audio or video clips. Analyses of the data shows:(1) the TDA group produced the most bei-constructions, the SLI group fewer, and the TDY group the fewest;(2) with respect to the proportion of long and short bei-constructions, the SLI group and the TDA group performed similarly, but they both differed from the TDY group;(3) according to within-group comparisons of the number of long and short passives, there existed difference in the TDY group, while no significant difference was found in both the SLI group and the TDA group;(4) with regard to subject omission, the SLI group performed similarly to the TDA group. The within- group comparison in the TDA group and the SLI group showed that sentence subjects in long bei-constructions were more likely to be omitted than in short bei-constructions;(5) as for bei-constructions with resultative verb compounds(RVCs), the SLI group produced a smaller number of short passives with RVCs than the TDA group; and(6) SLI children produced erroneous bei-constructions much more frequently. And all the errors are short passives. The erroneous beiconstructions fall into two patterns.Based on the findings, we discussed in the framework of generative grammar the characteristics of SLI children’s acquisition of the bei-construction and the reasons why there are such characteristics. We propose that:(a) Mandarin-speaking SLI children in general acquire the bei-construction worse than their typically developing peers. And they have a deficit in the acquisit ion of short passives, resulting in less production and more mistakes;(b) the SLI group and the TDY group have more difficulty in the acquisition of short passives than long passives. This verifies Feng’s(1998) and Huang’s(1999, 2009) analyses of the bei-construction and Leonard ’s(1998) proposal that modal auxiliaries and grammatical morphemes are harder to acquire for children with SLI; and(c) the two error patterns can be explained in the framework of generative grammar, and the cause of SLI children’s errors might be syntactic deficits, i.e. inability to acquire the VP complement in the bei-construction and the ba-construction.The present study, focusing on an issue that has not been given enough attention in mainland C hina, aimes to enhance our understanding of SLI. The findings could help uncover the characteristics of SLI in Mandarin-speaking children and reveal patterns in their production. Besides theoretical significance, the findings could also help with the diagnosis and treatment of SLI.