Syntactic Priming In The Production Of Ditransitive Constructions By Mandarin SLI Children

As an important structure in the grammar of both English and Chinese, the ditransitive construction arouses much attention in the field of both linguistics and psycholinguistics. Most linguistic studies focus on the categorization and the relationship between different types of the ditransitive construction. Meanwhile, the ditransitive construction is also wildly used in syntactic priming research to explore the representation and processing mechanism behind language acquisition and development.Specific language impairment(SLI) refers to a significant impairment in spoken language ability when there are no obvious accompanying conditions such as hearing loss, neurological damage, or mental retardation(Bishop 1992). As a developmental language disorder, it can affect both expressive and receptive language. Studies abroad, such as Leonard(2014), have reported that children with SLI exhibit deficits in different aspects of language which involve word learning, lexical and phonological representations, argument structure and morphosyntax like syntactic structure and grammatical morphology, and so on. According to the statistics abroad(Leonard 2000), seven percent of children have such language disorder and about half of these children with SLI have difficulties in learning and reading after admission to school(Mc Arthur et al. 2000). Hereby, it is reasonable to say that there are a relative large number of children who suffer from SLI in China.To test the existing theories and hypotheses mainly based on foreign languages and to explore the specific characteristics of Chinese SLI children, the present study makes an attempt to investigate the production of ditransitive constructions by Mandarin-speaking children through the syntactic priming paradigm. Children in the present research are divided into two groups: Specific language impairment(SLI) as the experiment group and Typically Developing Age-matched(TDA) as the control group. The ditransitive construction includes both the Double Object Construction(DOC) and Dative Construction(DC). DOC is further divided into S1(Subject + V + gei + NP1 + NP2) and S4(Subject + V + NP1 + NP2), while DC includes S2(Subject + V + NP2 + gei + NP1) and S3(Subject + gei + NP1 + V + NP2).Through the combination of both syntactic priming and spontaneous data, it was found that:(1) SLI children spontaneously produced more DOC than DC, and show a frequency order of different types of ditransitive constructions as: S1<S3<S2<S4. The priming effect of DOC(or S1, to be specific) is not significant while that of DC(S2) is significant;(2) The TDA group shows a preference for DC. Different types of ditransitive constructions are produced in the order of: S1<S4<S2<S3. Both the priming effects of DOC(S1) and the priming effect of DC(S2) are significant;(3) The prime condition has a significant effect on the production of both groups but there is difference in the priming effect of DOC and DC;(4) Both SLI and TDA have the productive knowledge of the ditransitive construction, which supports the early abstraction hypothesis. But SLI children’s performance resembles younger children in that their production is heavily affected by structural derivation while TDA children’s production is influenced by preference to some extent.The present study contributes to a better understanding of specific characteristics of Mandarin-speaking SLI children in the production of ditransitive constructions. It not only helps to verify and enrich previous research, but also has practical significance in the diagnosis, intervention and treatment of SLI.