Sentence Comprehension Strategies Used By 4-6 Years Old Mandarin-speaking Children With High Functioning Autism

Sentence comprehension has always been one of the focuses of children’s language acquisition researches,especially in autistic children.Many foreign scholars have conducted empirical studies on different sentence comprehension strategies used by children.Previous researches showed that children could make use of two strategies:word order strategy and morphosyntactic strategy(Bever,1970;Chapman,1978;Strohner & Nelson,1974;Tager-Flusberg,1981;Zhou,P.et al.,2016).However,there are few studies on sentence comprehension strategies for Mandarin-speaking children with autism.Studies have shown that autistic children have no significant differences in response to sentence comprehension tasks compared with Typically Developing(TD)children.Mandarin-speaking children with High-Functioning Autism(HFA)are recruited for the study to explore the strategies used by HFA children in sentence comprehension.24 children were chosen in this study,of which 12 were HFA children and 12 were age-matched children.Four experiments were conducted to investigate the use of different syntactic strategies in the comprehension of sentences by children with HFA.To see how the children would react when morphosyntactic cues conflicted with word order cues.In Experiment I and Experiment II,we used Ba-constructions without subjects and Bei-constructions without subjects to detect the use of morphosyntactic strategies.Subject presented Ba-constructions and Beiconstructions in Experiment III and Experiment IV were used to determine the use of word order strategies and to explore whether syntactic processing biases in sentences could be overcome.The results showed that the accuracy of HFA children was significantly lower than that of Typically-Developing Aged-matched(TDA)children only in subject presented passive constructions.HFA children could use word order strategy andmorphosyntactic strategy in sentence comprehension.However,compared with age-matched peers,children with HFA relied more on word order cues,and showed more difficulties in Experiment IV.This is consistent with the prediction of A-chain Deficit Hypothesis(ACDH)but not Argument Structure Complexity Hypothesis(ASCH).Based on the findings,the current study is theoretically and practically significant.Theoretically,the present study provides empirical evidence for A-chain Deficit Hypothesis(ACDH).This study proposes that the difficulty that HFA children encountered in the experiment is due to their temporary failure to understand the argument movement in Bei-construction.In practice,the results of this study indicate that passive constructions can be used as a diagnostic marker for children with HFA.This provides a reference repository of knowledge for HFA children educators and researchers,and HFA educators can conduct more targeted teaching based on these differences.For example,educators can instruct learners to acquire the simple declarative sentence first and then turn to the ‘Ba-’ construction,then to the ‘Bei-’ construction.