A Study Of The Use Of General-all-purpose Verbs By Mandarin-speaking SLI And HFA Children

This paper endeavors to investigate the use of General-all-purpose(GAP)verbs,by Mandarin-speaking children with specific language impairment(SLI)and high functioning autism(HFA)who may have the propensity to use a GAP verb which contains exceedingly general reference in a multitude of contexts to replace the action verbs which are more concrete and suitable in those contexts.In this study,production experiments are designed and implemented to examine the exact use of the GAP verbs by SLI and HFA children as compared with their typically developed(TD)age-matched peers.The exact use of GAP verbs inspected in the experiment includes their occurrences in children's responses to the research questions and the frequencies of the use of the GAP verbs in different contexts.Specifically,20 Chinese concrete action verbs have been chosen and depicted in pictures.In the experiments,the pictures are shown to the children with SLI or HFA and the TD children,and all the children are asked to tell the researchers what the man in each given picture is doing,prompted by the question “What is the man in the picture doing?” The children's responses are collected as experiment data.The result indicates that compared with the HFA children and the TD counterparts,the SLI children are most likely to produce GAP verbs,but no significant differences are found between the HFA and the TD in the exact use of the GAP verbs.Furthermore,the SLI children are inclined to produce GAP verbs when non-instrumental verbs(NIV)are shown to them,but this inclination is not conspicuous within the HFA group and within the TD children.