The Production Of Ba And Bei Sentences By Mandarin-Speaking Preschool Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders And Typically Developing Children

simple grammar cognition is preserved in autistic children,but their performance in complex grammar is unclear.In Mandarin Chinese,Ba sentences and Bei sentences are deemed as two complicated structures that are difficult to acquire for their complexity in both form and meaning.This research seeks to investigate the utterances of Ba and Bei sentences by Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder(ASD)and typically developing(TD)preschoolers in their natural utterances,as well as to examine the influence of caregiver input and individual factors on the production of Ba and Bei sentences.This study included 61 typically developing(TD)children(mean age:27.74±5.38 months;PCDI scores: 554.17±245.96)and 51 children with ASD(mean age: 54.69±14.09 months;PCDI scores: 503.86±195.22)matched on language ability.Based on the Child Language Data Exchange System(CHILDES),we collected,classified,coded,and analyzed the Ba and Bei sentences in the spontaneous speech by children and their caregivers during parent-child play.The main findings are as follows:To begin with,two groups of children were able to produce different types of Ba sentences with the highest frequency of resultative complements.This pattern was comparable to earlier study results and compatible with the principles in Basic Child Grammar that the results of the event,as a salient perspective in scenes,would stand at the priority level in the grammaticizing process.Nevertheless,children with ASD demonstrated a disadvantage in Ba utterances for their worse performance in the overall Ba utterances and the diversity of Ba utterances than TD children,and this disadvantage became more apparent in Ba statements with directed complements which may be due to their poor executive function and temporal processing.The last point was that both groups of children demonstrated a high percentage of errors in Ba utterances,and their total output and variety were markedly different from that of adults,indicating that their understanding of Ba sentences is not yet developed.However,children performed significantly worse in Bei sentences than in Ba sentences.Among all 117 children,only one autistic child produced a Bei sentence with a resultative complement.On one hand,the disappearance of Bei sentences may cause by the lack of competence.The incremental processing in Bei sentences was a complicated task for children,and the executive function defect of ASD children makes it more difficult for them to produce Bei sentences successfully.On the other hand,it may also be a deliberate avoidance.When children were faced with more difficult production tasks and complex processing in the natural context,they were more likely to avoid this difficulty and to express their ideas in SVO word order.Then,the input from two groups of caregivers was compared,and the results revealed a similar input pattern in overall Ba and Bei utterances.In addition,the correlation analysis indicated that the caregiver input had no direct correlation with the children’s usage of Ba sentences.The caregiver input strengthened the overall syntactic competence,which then further positively affected the children’s utterances of Ba sentences in both groups.Nevertheless,Bei sentences were identified in a considerably smaller proportion of caregiver input than Ba sentences,which may be insufficient to offer enough information for youngsters to develop Bei knowledge.As a result,it appears that input has no direct effect on children’s Bei utterances.Finally,excluding the influence of external input,we also found that the most important factor affecting children’s Ba utterances is their mean length of utterances(MLU),which is also commonly used to assess children’s overall grammatical development.To be more specific,the overall Ba utterances and several types of Ba utterances of the two groups of children have been proved to be significantly positively correlated with MLU,indicating that MLU could be a robust predictor of Ba utterances in our research.This evidence also revealed that the utterances of Ba sentences were based on the overall syntactic development of two groups of children.Moreover,we also verified the uneven pattern in the Ba utterances similar to previous research because of the positive correlation between Ba sentences with locative complements and age.It indicated that different types of Ba utterances may have different development paths,denying the frequency effect of input because locative complement was the typical type of input with high frequency since early childhood.To summarize,although deficits of children with ASD make complex grammar acquisition more difficult for them,they retain the capacity to construct complex grammar structures.Furthermore,the high frequency of certain Ba sentence patterns in the utterances of the two groups of children indicates that one or more types of structures will be grammaticized preferentially in children’s grammar acquisition.Nevertheless,Bei sentences rarely appear in the output of two groups of children.It may because children may struggle to process the complex grammar.Alternatively,it may also be due to children’s deliberate avoidance.because of children’s difficulty in complicated processing and deliberate avoidance,Bei utterances were rarely identified in both groups of children.Our findings serve to explain the limited role of input in the acquisition of Ba and Bei sentences,and we recommend that future study should focus on the influence of language faculty and social communication and on Ba and Bei utterances.