A Study Of Nonword Repetition And Sentence Repetition In Mandarin-speaking Children With SLI And Children With HFA

Studies abroad reported that children with specific language impairment(SLI)and those with high-functioning autism(HFA)have demonstrated some overlap in communicative and social domains,which makes it difficult to determine an accurate diagnosis.No study explored the similarities and differences between children with SLI and children with HFA on nonword repetition(hereunder NWR)and sentence repetition(hereunder SR),which have been proved to be sensitive markers for SLI.As far as I know,no comparative study has been conducted on the NWR and SR tasks between Mandarin-speaking children with SLI and those with HFA at home and abroad.The aims of the current study are first to investigate the performance of children with SLI and children with HFA on NWR and SR tasks,and then to generalize similarities as well as differences between those clinical participants on their performance of NWR and SR,respectively,and finally to explore the possible underlying causes of such similarities and differences.To fulfill these aims,two tasks were conducted,namely,NWR and SR.The experiment stimuli contained 40 nonwords and 128 sentences.Three participant groups were included: a SLI group with 18 participants,who were identified through a battery of language measures;a HFA group with 17 participants,who were diagnosed by pediatricians/psychiatrists;and a typically-developing aged-matched(TDA)group with 25 participants.All the participants were matched on their chronological age.The results revealed that as for the NWR task,children with SLI performed worse than the TDA controls on nonce words(words consisting of attested syllables in Mandarin)and gap words(words consisting of unattested syllables in Mandarin)at all syllable lengths.Participants with HFA performed as well as the TDA participants on gap words,and a significant difference was only manifested on nonce words.On pairwise comparison,HFA children outperformed SLI children on five-syllable noncewords and three-,four-,and five-syllable gap words.Furthermore,the performance of all participants in the current study was affected by word lengths and word types.In particular,the higher the word-likeness was,the better one would perform;the shorter a nonword was,the better one would perform.As for SR,TDA children outscored HFA children and SLI children on all target grammatical items.Although children with SLI scored lower than children with HFA on complex structures including passives,relative clauses,and double-object constructions,no significant difference was observed.Scores on NWR were correlated with those on SR for participants with HFA,but not for those with SLI.For a plausible interpretation,I proposed that children with SLI may have deficits in both phonological short-term memory and phonological representation,while children with HFA might have diminished phonological representation.Moreover,there could be an overlap on their linguistic capacity and linguistic profiles.As for NWR,deficits in both phonological short-term memory and phonological representation in SLI children may hinder them from retaining phonological information and to retrieve lexical knowledge from their long-term memory when hearing nonwords.Since children with HFA may have comparable phonological short-term memory as TDA children,they performed equally well on nonce words.Similarly,the poor phonological representation of HFA children may prevent them from accessing their long-term vocabulary knowledge,which may benefit them to repeat nonce words.As for SR,it seems that SLI children and HFA children might have an overlap on their linguistic characteristics.The correlation between NWR and SR for HFA children might suggest that factors such as phonological short-term memory and phonological representation play a role in their SR performance to some extent.Exploring the similarities and differences on performance of NWR and SR between SLI and HFA children,we may have a better understanding of the language profiles of children with SLI and those with HFA.For the current study,NWR,especially three-,four-,and five-syllable gap words,could effectively distinguish SLI from HFA;while SR may be sensitive for distinguishing individuals with languageimpairment from those with normal language development.This finding may contribute to accurate assessment and diagnosis for both HFA and SLI as well as to inspire clinicians to develop feasible intervention and treatment plans.