The Acquisition Of Chinese Ba Constructions In Mandarin-speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment And Children With High-functioning Autism

Children with High-Functioning Autism(HFA)are generally characterized by impaired pragmatics,while children with Specific Language Impairment(SLI)mainly have deficits in grammar.However,a lot of researches indicate that there is an overlap in the profile between children with HFA and children with SLI in grammar and pragmatics.Some scholars even draw the conclusion that children with SLI and children with HFA share the same etiology.It is reported that children with SLI and children with HFA exhibit deficits in structures involving syntactic movements.The ba construction is a unique structure in Chinese which is proposed to derive from NP movement and verb raising.This study investigates the acquisition of ba constructions in children with HFA and children with SLI in order to find out the similarities and differences between the two kinds of language disorders,which will contribute to the differential diagnosis of children with HFA and children with SLI.To this end,17 Mandarin-speaking pre-school children with HFA,18 age-matched children with SLI,and a control group of 22 age-matched typically developing(TDA)children were tested on their production and comprehension of ba constructions through a syntactic priming task and a picture selection task respectively.The results revealed that the SLI group resembled the HFA group in that they both performed worse than TDA children in the overall language production and language comprehension tests.However,differences between the HFA group and the SLI group were manifested in the distribution of different types of ba constructions and their error patterns.Firstly,children with HFA produced significantly more ba constructions with resultative verb complements than children with SLI.The within-group comparison showed that children with SLI produced most ba constructions with aspect markers while children with HFA produced most ba constructions with RVC complements.Secondly,in terms of the error patterns,children with SLI produced more SVO sentences than children with HFA.Children with HFA made many pragmatic infelicitous responses,such as off-topic responses and the repetition of test questions,in both the production and comprehension tests while these phenomena were rarely seen in the SLI group.The performance of children with HFA and children with SLI can be explained by the Representational Deficits for Dependent Relations(RDDR)and Derivational Complexity Hypothesis(DCH).We propose that children with HFA and children with SLI have difficulties in acquiring ba constructions.More specifically,they have problems in handling the non-local dependency relation between the moved elements and the trace,and in assigning thematic roles from the trace in ba constructions.It is acknowledged that SVO structures does not involve complex syntactic movements.The syntactic analysis revealed that compared to ba constructions with resultative verb complements and directional verb complements,the derivation of ba constructions with pure aspect markers requires the least number of syntactic movements.The performance of children with SLI showed that they are more sensitive to the number of movement operations.Since children with HFA made many unusual infelicitous responses in the experiments,we assume that the main problem for the SLI group is related to grammar while the poor performance of the HFA group possibly results from their pragmatic deficiencies.Theoretically,the present study provides empirical evidence for the existing hypotheses.Practically,the findings of this study will contribute to the differential diagnosis of HFA and SLI.