The Ba-construction In Mandarin-speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

Extensive studies abroad have shown that children with specific language impairment(SLI)have difficulties in the acquisition of complex structures that involve movement of the sentential elements.To date,there are very few studies investigating children's acquisition of Mandarin complex structures.The Baconstruction requires the more complex NP-movement and verb-raising compared with canonical SVO construction in Mandarin.This thesis undertakes to explore whether Mandarin SLI children encounter difficulties in acquiring the Baconstruction,aiming to provide more empirical evidence and a better understanding of the characteristics of the Ba-construction in Mandarin SLI children,to locate the source of deficits in SLI children,if there are and shed light on more accurate identification and effective intervention towards children with SLI.This study adopted both spontaneous data and controlled data.The spontaneous data were collected regularly in a period of one month to avoid the influence of the fast development of children's language,which would provide a holistic picture of the characteristics of the SLI children's Ba-constructions.The controlled data were collected through four controlled experiments,namely,the picture-elicitation task,the syntactic priming task,the ternary sentence-picture matching task and the sentence repetition task.The main findings of the present study are as follows:(1)SLI children produced significantly less Ba-constructions than the Typically Developing Age-matched(TDA)group in the spontaneous data and manifested poor comprehension and production abilities in the controlled tasks,which indicate that SLI children encounter difficulties in the acquisition of the Ba-construction.The analysis of the non-target responses in the production task indicates that the SLIchildren used various simpler structures without syntactic movement to provide a task-appropriate response.(2)Our subjects showed discrepancies over Ba-constructions with different complements.Children with and without SLI performed best on the Ba-construction with resultative complements in the spontaneous data.SLI children also manifested best comprehension of Ba-constructions with resultative complements in the ternary sentence-picture matching task.But there was no significant difference in different patterns of Ba-constructions in other controlled tasks.(3)SLI group made significantly more errors in the production tasks,which contained comparatively more varieties of error types.The error analysis suggested that children with SLI had deficits with the functional category,with establishing syntactic dependency between the moved elements and the origins and with thematic role assignment via a chain.Additionally,the poor performance in the sentence repetition task uncovered the impaired working memory(WM)of SLI Children.This finding supports the assumption that poor WM might act as a reliable and culture-free marker for SLI.Theoretically,the present study provides empirical evidence for Procedural Deficit Hypothesis(PDH)and Derivational Complexity Hypothesis(DCH)because SLI children's impaired language abilities and limited WM could be explained by the PDH,and the greater difficulties with the Ba-construction,compared to that with SVO sentences,could be illuminated by the DCH.In practice,the findings of the thesis suggest that the Ba construction could be a clinical marker for the identification of SLI children.