A Study On The Interpretation Of Sentences With Focus Particle Zhi ('only') In Mandarin-speaking Children With SLI And HFA

There are quite a few foreign studies comparing the linguistic and cognitive ability of children with specific language impairment(SLI)with that of children with high-functioning autism(HFA)to get a better knowledge of these special children's characteristics,while the comparison between SLI children and HFA children has not drawn much attention in Mainland China.Studies investigating English-speaking children have shown that SLI children and HFA children perform similarly in the comprehension and production of some linguistic items with different underlining causes.It is significant to explore the characteristics of Mandarin-speaking children with SLI and HFA both for clinic diagnosing and for theoretical researches.This study mainly investigated SLI and HFA children's interpretation of sentences with focus particle zhi(‘only')to find out the similarities and differences between the two kinds of language disorders and get a better understanding of their linguistic ability.In this study,21 Mandarin-speaking children with SLI,32 HFA children and 28typically-developing age-matched(TDA)children from Hefei,Jiaozuo,Qingdao,Guangzhou were recruited.In experiment 1,with picture selection task,the interpretation of sentences with focus particle zhi in pre-subject position and pre-VP position was tested,and it was found that in sentences with pre-subject zhi TDA children made ‘VP-oriented' responses,which were consistent with the results of previous studies;SLI children and HFA children made similar responses in sentences with pre-subject zhi and pre-VP zhi,which were different from those TDA children made;SLI children and HFA children performed similarly and differed from TDA children mainly in the interpretation of sentences with pre-VP zhi.Therefore,in experiment 2 and experiment 3,children's interpretation of sentences with pre-VP zhi was tested using question-with-picture and question-with-video tasks.Without the interruption of ‘additive character' in experiment 1,both of SLIchildren and HFA children still performed worse than TDA children,and there were no differences between SLI and HFA children's performance.According to the theory of focus interpretation,it is said that interpreting sentences with focus particle zhi includes two steps-identifying the focused elements and alternatives computation.The results of this study demonstrated that SLI children and HFA children performed worse in both of the two steps than TDA children.For the identification of focused elements,SLI children and HFA children have shown problems of syntactic constraints;for alternative computation,the poor performance of SLI children and HFA children might lie in the problems with discourse integration or processing limitations.This study as a pioneering study to investigate SLI children and HFA children's interpretation of the focus structure with focus particle zhi found that the two types of special children performed similarly and shared some similarities in linguistic ability.There should be further studies to explore whether the underlining causes of their performance are similar.