A Study On The Acquisition Of Wh-argument And Wh-adjunct Questions In Mandarin-speaking Children With SLI

The study on specific language impairment(SLI for short)is a quite new area in mainland China.Foreign studies on SLI have revealed that children with SLI have special difficulty in the acquisition of wh-questions,especially in wh-object questions.There is only one study on Mandarin-speaking SLI children aiming at examining the acquisition of single wh-questions,which found the wh-subject and wh-object asymmetry in Chinese SLI children.However,most of the previous studies focus only on wh-questions introduced by wh-pronouns,like what,who and which,while SLI children's acquisition of wh-questions introduced by wh-adverbs like where,how and why is unknown yet.Hence,based on the previous studies,the current study aims at exploring the acquisition of wh-questions introduced by wh-pronouns as well as those by wh-adverbs in Mandarin-speaking children with and without SLI,which intends to examine SLI children's performance on wh-questions introduced by wh-adverbs along with the similarities and differences between the two types of children when they acquire wh-argument and wh-adjunct questions.To find answers to the above thoughts,experiments are conducted to investigate the comprehension and production of wh-questions in three groups of children.One group is the SLI group made up of 15 children who are identified through a series of professional scales.The other two groups are control groups which are composed of 15 typically developing age matched children(TD-AM)and 15 typically younger children(TD-Y)who are significantly younger than the SLI children.The procedure of the experiments is as follows.Firstly,an elicited production experiment is conducted which tests 18 wh-argument questions balanced in subject and object questions with the wh-words shui ‘who',shenme ‘what' and na(ge/zhi/xie)‘which' as well as 9 wh-adjunct questions with the wh-words nali ‘where',zenmeyang ‘how',weishenme ‘why'.Then a comprehension task is carried out in the form of question-answering with the help of pictures.The data collected from the experiments were analyzed by SPSS 21.0.The findings were as follows.Firstly,the Mandarin-speaking children with SLI had severe difficulty in the production of wh-argument and wh-adjunct questions.Secondly,there were no deficits in SLI children's comprehension of wh-questions except the how-questions.Thirdly,like the matched groups,children with SLI behaved better in wh-adjunct production,though all of their productions were significantly poorer than the controlled ones.Lastly,individual differences in subject wh-questions were discovered within the SLI group.The discrepant performances in subject wh-questions in SLI children could be interpreted in terms of the Derivational Complexity Metric(DCM for short,Jakubowicz,2005,2011)and the degree of deficits in SLI children.Individual differences also are conducive to testing the existing theories which explain the derivation of Mandarin wh-questions and we found that Huang's(1982)proposal is well fit for the explanation of the differences.The difficulty in understanding how-questions in SLI children may result from the lower input than other wh-questions in their language environment.As for the better performance in wh-adjunct questions compared with wh-argument questions,the different syntactic nature of argument and adjunct gives rise to the different performances.The current study is theoretically and practically significant.Theoretically speaking,the present study can attest the existing theories.Practically speaking,the current study can contribute to the identification,diagnosis,intervention and treatment of Mandarin-speaking SLI children.