| Autism Spectrum Disorders(ASD)is characterized by deficits in social communication and interaction,and restricted repetitive interests/behaviors.Difficulty in understanding others’ minds is a core cognitive feature of autism spectrum conditions.Mental verbs are important tools to understand others’ minds through desire,cognition,emotion and perception and the acquisition of the mental verbs reflects the children’s development of Theory of Mind(To M).The abnormality in To M is one of the important causes of social and communication impairments in ASD.It has been demonstrated that children with ASD have difficulty in understanding mental verbs.Studies on mental verbs in typically developing(TD)children of different ages and school-aged children with ASD have yielded fruitful results at home and abroad over the past years,focusing on a desire-psychology to cognition-psychology trajectory of To M,mental verb constructions in sentence structures and the impact of parental language input.However,few previous studies have investigated the acquisition of mental verbs in Mandarin-speaking preschool children with ASD,in terms of the subjects,methods and contents.The present research focuses on mental verbs in Mandarin-speaking preschool children with ASD and its control group,TD children.This thesis aims to explores the universality of To M,the development features,mental verb constructions in sentence structures,as well as the factors impacting on the acquisition of mental verbs,especially the parental influence.48 preschool children with ASD and 53 TD children were matched on expressive vocabulary levels in Putonghua Communicative Development Inventory(PCDI).Using the international authoritative research tool,Child Language Data Exchange System(CHILDES),this study revealed that,first,the acquisition of mental verbs in ASD group was quite delayed compared with that of TD counterparts.For both groups,the desire terms accounted for the majority while the number of perceptional terms,emotional terms and cognitive terms differed slightly among each other.Besides,the desire terms appeared earliest among all the four terms in both groups.Second,the ASD group produced quite simple and limited mental verb constructions in the sentence structures.Third,both TD and ASD groups’ production of mental verbs were positively associated with their parents’ mental verbs production and children’s own language ability.In summary,this research not only suggests a pattern of To M development in young Mandarin-speaking children with ASD similar to that of previous studies,but also extends the developmental sequence of mental verbs from a desire-to-cognition psychology to a desire /perception / emotion-to-cognition psychology.In addition,it is difficult for the preschoolers with ASD to acquire the mental verbs,especially the emotional and cognitive terms,indicating the core deficits in cognition and the delayed development of To M.Finally,caregiver’s input and language abilities of children play an indispensable role in the acquisition of mental verbs in children with ASD and TD children.Future studies are suggested to investigate Mandarin-speaking preschool children with ASD’s mental verbs by To M tasks or longitudinal studies. |
