The Acquisition Of Pivotal Constructions In Mandarin-speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment And Children With High Functioning Autism

Up to now,some similar clinical manifestations have been found between children with High Functioning Autism(hereinafter called HFA)and children with Specific Language Impairment(hereinafter called SLI).A few comparative studies have been conducted to investigate language development of these two kinds of children with language disorders.These overseas studies indicate that there are certain similarities and differences between children with SLI and children with HFA in the acquisition of some syntactic structures.However,there is no such comparative study in Mainland China yet.Previous studies have found that typically developing Mandarin-speaking children can acquire the pivotal construction at the age of three but children with SLI have difficulty in the acquisition of this sentence structure.This indicates that children with disorders may exhibit some impairment in the acquisition of the pivotal construction.Therefore,the present study aims to explore the acquisition of the pivotal construction in children with SLI and children with HFA and to examine whether they evince difficulty acquiring this construction.This study is an experimental one involving three groups of children as participants: the SLI group,the HFA group and the typically developing group,which are matched for chronological age.A unified standard of language ability was adopted to select the children.A production experiment and a comprehension experiment were designed and conducted.The production experiment consisted of syntactic priming tasks and the comprehension experiment consists of picture selection tasks.The main findings are as follows:Firstly,the children with SLI performed significantly better than the children with HFA in the production of the pivotal construction.Most of the sentences produced by the children with SLI were ungrammatical,whereas the children with HFA tended to use some simple sentences to describe a part of the picture.What is more,there was no significant difference between these two kinds of children in the comprehension of this construction.Secondly,the children with SLI and the children with HFA had difficulty in acquiring the pivotal construction when compared to the typically developing children.Both of the clinical groups performed worse than the control group in the production experiment and comprehension experiment in the current study.Finally,the children with HFA exhibited good productive and receptive language ability of the verb qing ‘invite’ but not of the verb jiao ‘ask’ and rang ‘let’ in the pivotal construction.However,the children with SLI were prone to use the verb rang ‘let’ in the production experiment although they had poor performance in the comprehension of the pivotal sentences using the verb rang ‘let’.It seems that the children with SLI demonstrate a similar pattern to typically developing children.From the results of the present study,we suppose the children with SLI and the children with HFA may have difficulty in assigning the thematic roles to the pivot in the pivotal construction so that they performed worse in producing and comprehending this construction.We also assume that a deficit in attentional disengagement and a poor comprehension of the semantic meaning of pivotal verbs lead to the lower performances of the children with HFA on the acquisition of the pivotal construction than the children with SLI.Theoretically,the present research can provide evidence for some hypotheses.Practically,the current study can contribute to the identification,intervention,and treatment of Mandarin-speaking children with language disorders.What’s more,clinicians could also stress the importance of training on the impaired sentence structures of the children with language disorders.