A Comparative Study Of The Acquisition Of Passives By Mandarin-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment And High-Functioning Autism

This thesis concerns the acquisition of passives by Mandarin-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment(SLI)as compared to those with High-Functioning Autism(HFA).As SLI and HFA often show similar clinical symptoms,some children with SLI may be misdiagnosed as children with HFA,and vice versa.In recent years,some foreign studies have successfully differentiated children with SLI from those with HFA by parsing their grammatical impairments.In Mainland China,however,there exist few published studies on the grammatical abilities by Mandarin-speaking children with SLI as compared to those with HFA,let alone studies on the acquisition of passives by Mandarin-speaking children with SLI as compared to those with HFA.Poor performance in using passives has been identified as a clinical marker for SLI,but studies on passives concerning HFA children have yielded mixed results.Therefore,this thesis aims to explore whether and how the acquisition of passives in Mandarin-speaking children with SLI differ from that in children with HFA.Two research questions are addressed:1.How do Mandarin-speaking children with SLI compare with those with HFA in the acquisition of passives?2.What are the possible causes for the similarity and difference between the two groups of children in the acquisition of passives?To answer the research questions,controlled experiments are conducted,in the cities of Xi'an and Hefei in China,to investigate the production and comprehension of passives by 15 children with SLI,17 children with HFA and 25Typically-Developing Age Matched(TDA)children.The experiments consist of a production test and a comprehension test.The production test comprises a syntactic priming task to examine the participants' production of passives;the comprehensiontest is a sentence-picture matching task to test participants' comprehension of passives.The data collected from the experiments are analyzed by SPSS 24.0.The major findings are summarized as follows.On the one hand,both children with SLI and those with HFA exhibited some difficulty in the acquisition of passives.On the other hand,there also existed some differences between the two groups.Firstly,children with SLI performed significantly poorer than those with HFA in the production of short passives.Then,children with HFA showed a clear asymmetry between their production of short and long passives,while there was no such asymmetry in the SLI group.Besides,in terms of the types of error made in the production test and the comprehension test,HFA children made some pragmatically infelicitous responses,while SLI children made next to no such errors.The poor performance of passives in children with SLI in this study matches the prediction of van der Lely's(1994,1996,1998)Representational Deficit for Dependent Relations(RDDR)account.That is,this study suggests that SLI children's difficulty in the acquisition of passives originates in their deficit in the computational syntactic system,while HFA children's poor performance concerning passives might not necessarily originate in a syntactic impairment,but may have to do with their pragmatic and discourse difficulties as well as their deficit in executive function,inhibitory control in particular.For this reason,the performance of children with SLI was not completely consistent with children with HFA in the production and comprehension of passives.As mentioned above,this comparative study has found some differences in the acquisition of passives between Mandarin-speaking children with SLI and those with HFA,which may contribute to SLI-HFA differentiation.Successful SLI-HFA differentiation will help therapists' diagnosis and treatment of children with SLI and those with HFA.Besides,theoretically speaking,this study helps to verify some acquisition hypotheses,namely the the A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis(Borer andWexler 1987,1992),the Universal Phase Requirement(Wexler 2004)and the RDDR account(van der Lely 1994,1996,1998).