A Comparative Study Of The Production And Comprehension Of Ditransitive Constructions In Mandarin-speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment And Children With High-functioning Autism

In the traditional view,Specific Language Impairment(SLI)and High-functioning Autism(HFA)are recognized as two unrelated disorders: children with SLI mainly show deficits in the grammatical domain,while for children with HFA,the development of grammar is thought to be normal but their pragmatical ability,deficient.However,current studies have found that there were cases where children with SLI and children with HFA were impaired in both syntactic and pragmatic domain.As a result of this similarity,the rate of misdiagnosis is high for children with SLI and those HFA children who both exhibit language impairment.In recent years,some foreign studies have successfully differentiated these two kinds of children by characterizing their grammatical impairments.Ditransitive constructions,which have complex argument structures,have been found to pose difficulty to English-speaking children with SLI in many studies.By contrast,the situation in children with HFA is far from clear as there are few studies in children with HFA in this respect.Moreover,in Mainland China,there is no published research pertinent.Therefore,this research aims to characterize the similarities and differences between Mandarin-speaking children with SLI and those with HFA in their production and comprehension of ditransitive constructions.Eighteen children diagnosed with HFA,aged 4-6,were recruited and matched on age to 17 children with SLI,and 27 typically developing children(TDA).Participants were invited to take a picture-matching comprehension task and a priming production task on the four forms of ditransitive constructions.Between-group comparisosn were conducted to detect the similarities and differences among the three groups in the performance of ditransitive constructions and within-group comparison,to identify the difference among the four alternative structures in each group.The results are as follows.(1)There is a general resemblance between the SLI group and the HFA group in their lower-than-TDA performance on the two tasks.Specifically,the effect of computational complexity is evident in the two groups.They show a significant preference for Double Object Construction(DOC)over Dative Construction(DC)and favor the pattern Subject+V+NP1+NP2(S4)instead of the one Subject+V+gei+NP1+NP2(S1).High computational complexity also results in argument omission and substitution of a ditransitive verb with two mono-transitive verbs in the two groups.(2)Despite these similarities,the error patterns of the two groups in the experimental tasks are not identical:(a)Children with SLI,rather than children with HFA,exhibit significantly more argument omission than the TDA group.(b)While grammatical errors can be found as well,the impairment in pragmatics in HFA children stands out from other deficiencies.They produce ditransitive constructions with a direct object in the form of a definite bare noun,rather than an indefinite Num-CL-N phrase,and provide significantly more pragmatically infelicitous responses than the TDA group.(c)The SLI group and HFA group are distinguished by their performance patterns in the comprehension task.Children with SLI display a syntactically-principled impairment,with their accuracy decreasing in accordance with the increase in complexity.By contrast,children with HFA show an overall deficit in all of the four forms of ditransitive constructions.The poor performance of the children with HFA and the children with SLI can be accounted for by the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis(DCH),which defines that the more internal or external movements a structure involves,the more complex it is.Accordingly,the four patterns of ditransitive constructions in Mandarin manifest different scale in terms of the derivational complexity,nonuniform performance in each pattern,therefore,is displayed.As a result of processing limitations,forms that require complex movement may be taxing for the atypical-developing children.Additionally,the lower-than-TDA performance of children with HFA could be attributed to their deficient knowledge of information structure or definiteness,for which they have difficulty choosing the usual form for the direct and indirect object as the TDA children do.The current study enriches relevant studies on the acquisition of ditransitive constructions,supports the DCH.Moreover,it provides clinicians with distinct characteristics of children with SLI and those with HFA in their production and comprehension of ditransitive constructions,which may help clinicians to differentiate between the two types of disorders and decrease the rate of misdiagnosis.