A Comparative Study Of The Use Of The Aspect Markers Zhe And Le By Mandarin-Speaking Children With SLI And Children With HFA

The study of functional morphemes has always been of great consequence in the linguistic field,and has received considerable attention in the field of children's language acquisition as well.There are a lot of findings contributing to the evidence that autism and specific language impairment(SLI)are developmental disorders that,even though distinct by definition,have in common some features of language and social behavior as well,and thus the two disorders are easily to be misdiagnosed.Despite the fact that the pragmatic deficits characterizing autism spectrum disorder(ASD)are widely acknowledged,morphosyntactic differences in language comprehension and production for affected children should be taken into consideration.To date,several studies have suggested that certain syntactic dependencies in individuals with high-functioning autism(HFA)are intact.In contrast,so far,a growing body of literature on the acquisition of functional morphemes in children with SLI has been carried out in many countries,and the results unanimously indicate that children with SLI have difficulty in the acquisition of functional morphemes and this is a hallmark of children with SLI.From this point of view,it can be presumed that Chinese aspect markers can also be used as grammatical markers to distinguish the two kinds of children.The present study examines the use of Chinese aspect markers zhe and le in Chinese-speaking children with SLI and children with HFA in order to discover the similarities of as well as differences between the two kinds of children in terms of using zhe and le.56 children(15 children with SLI,26 age-matched children with normal language development and 16 age-matched children with HFA)whose ages range from four to six years old were enrolled in the present study.Three elicitation tasks including production,comprehension and repetition of the aspect markers le and zhe were carefully constructed and implemented.Both quantitative analysis of the experimental results and qualitative analysis of elicited language samples from theexperiments revealed that there existed significant differences between the children with SLI and the children with HFA in the production of the perfective aspect marker le.Compared with the children with HFA,the children with SLI had underdeveloped ability to produce the perfective aspect marker le.Furthermore,compared with children with HFA who presented enormous variability in the language profiles,there existed an absolute dominant proportion of omitting of the aspect markers le and zhe among the children with SLI.In this sense,the aspect marker le can be considered as a grammatical marker to distinguish the two kinds of children.The present study fills a gap in the use of the aspect markers in Chinese-speaking children with SLI as compared to children with HFA.For the present study,the aspect marker le might be a grammatical marker which can effectively distinguish the two kinds of children.From the standpoint of diagnosis,the study to some extent contributes to the development of diagnostic assessment measures and specialized intervention practices.