Phonological Errors In Mandarin-speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment And High-functioning Autism

When acquiring their mother tongue,children are expected to make mismatches that are different from adult speech.Such‘special strategies'are used by children before they fully acquire the phonological system of their mother tongue and usually disappear with age.However,it has been found that children with specific language impairment(SLI)and children with high-functioning autism(HFA)may have different performances on phonological acquisition as compared to children with typical development.Differences in the patterns of‘strategies'may shed light on the nature of the underlying deficits.As for children with SLI,phonological abilities have been reported limited in languages such as English,Italian,Hebrew,French,etc.,in which differences in phonological errors have been found as compared to either age-matched or younger linguistic ability matched children with typical development.Nevertheless,the results of comparisons between children with HFA and children with typical development have been more varied as phonological abilities are considered relatively strong in those children.As studies on the phonological comparison between children with SLI and children with HFA are not yet available in Mandarin Chinese,the current study serves an initial attempt to explore the phonological performance between these two groups of children.Since there have been a good wealth of studies on the phonology of typically developing children speaking Chinese and on the phonology of these two groups of children speaking other languages,it is necessary to take a closer look on their linguistic ability to find further understanding and ways for differentiation.To test existing findings and hypotheses mainly based on foreign languages and to find out phonological performance of children with SLI and children with HFA in Chinese language,the present study carries out a preliminary investigation on their production by picture-naming tasks.Children participating in this study belong to three groups,namely 16 children with HFA,21 children with SLI and 21 age-matched children with typical development(TDA).Experiment materials comprise of 96 targetwords which sample all the legal consonant-vowel combinations in Mandarin Chinese,with full behavior of every consonant guaranteed and all tones covered.Through analyses of the production data,findings of the present study are as follows:1)in terms of general error amount,children with SLI have significantly more errors in consonants/?/and/?~h/than TDA children and in consonant/?/than HFA children.HFA children are significantly less accurate in consonants/f/and/l/than TDA children;2)in terms of places of articulation,SLI children performed significantly worse in affricates than HFA children.HFA children did worse in liquid than TDA children;3)in terms of manners of articulation,SLI children made significantly more errors in alveolars than TDA children and in labial-dental than HFA children;4)in terms of error types,SLI children used backing process significantly more than the other two groups,and final/n/deletion significantly more than TDA children.HFA children used assimilation significantly more than the other two groups.Generally speaking,some findings are observed common among the three groups,some are shared only in SLI group and HFA group,and others,different between groups.To be more specific,children with SLI and children with HFA share similarities with children with typical development,while some unusual sound changes are found unique to each group.Findings of the present study share similarities with studies on children with SLI and children with HFA in other languages,especially the confirmation of phonological difficulties reported in children with SLI in other languages,and provide differences in detailed for the situation in Chinese language.Theorectically,the present study sheds light on the phonological abilities of Mandarin-speaking children with SLI and HFA and expands research scope of related field in Chinese language.It is also referential to clinical assessment,intervention and treatment.