| Children with developmental language disorder(DLD)experience difficulties acquiring language,which is specific language impairment that cannot result from neurological damage,environmental deprivation,emotional disorder,intellectual disability,or hearing impairment.Verb-argument structures play an established role as a hub in the regulation of the Chinese grammatical system,determining children’s core language expression.The present study explores the essence of language production and comprehension,the cognitive representations,the influencing factors,and the cognitive impairment mechanisms in the acquisition of verb-argument structure by Chinese-speaking children with DLD.The research framework is built on the usage-based theory of children’s language acquisition and the theories of children with DLD’s processing limitations.The research questions addressed in this study are as follows.(1)What are the characteristics of novel verb and argument structure in Chinese-speaking children with DLD?(2)What factors can affect the production of verb-argument structure in Chinese-speaking children with DLD?(3)What are the characteristics of directional verb compounds(DVCs),resultative verb compounds(RVCs),and argument structures used by Chinese-speaking children with DLD?By addressing these research questions,the present study further explains the essence of Chinese-speaking children with DLD’s language difficulties.The participants of the present study were 30 children,including 10 children with DLD,10 children with typically-developing age-matched(TDA)and 10 children with typically-developing younger(TDY).The children with DLD in the experimental group ranged in age from 4;02 to 6;02.The children with TDA in the control group ranged in age from 4;04 to 6;03.The children with TDY in the control group ranged in age from 2;11 to 3;11.The Computerized Analysis System(CLAN)program in the Child Language Data Exchange System(CHILDES)corpus was used to transcribe and extract the elicited children’s language samples.The statistical methods of multiple comparisons or multi-factor ANOVA tests were used to analyze the language data.Besides,the present study adopts the quantitative research method which is supplemented by the qualitative research method.The present study mainly consists of a set of experiments concerning Chinese verb argument structures.The first series of experiments study the children with DLD’s understanding and production of novel verbs with argument structure.The second sets of experiments explore whether length factors or the verb-argument structure can affect the production of children with DLD.The third sets of experiments of verb compounds study the production of directional verb compounds under the stimuli of cartoon clips,the production of resultative verb compounds in"cutting and breaking"(C&B)events,and the argument structure of transitive RVCs in a truth-value judgment.The major findings in this study are as follows.(1)The Chinese-speaking children with DLD show adequate understanding abilities to match between the actions and events.However,the DLD group presents high percentages of correct matching between the transitive events and causative verbs,while they also present low percentages of correct matching between the intransitive events and non-causative verbs.Novel verbs in children with DLD is less produ’ced than in the control groups under training and non-training modes.However,predicate structure’s prosody can not affect the children’s production of the novel verbs.(2)When it comes to the morphosyntactic task,the complexity of verb argument is the main factor that can significantly influence the output of verb argument structure of children with DLD.The sentence length is a secondary factor,which can influence language production that does not reach a significant level.These factors mutually affect the production of verb argument structure in Chinese-speaking children with DLD.The complexity of verb arguments has an essential impact on the subject argument omissions in Chinese-speaking children with DLD.No significant difference between the subject arguments and object arguments omissions indicates that no remarkable effect of the optional subject period has been found in Chinese-speaking children with DLD.Chinese-speaking children with DLD manifest significant defects in processing object arguments of three-placed verbs,reflecting the incomplete linguistic representation.However,children with DLD present three characteristics for the non-canonical uses.Firstly,Chinese-speaking children with DLD show the features of arbitrary additions or omissions of unnecessary arguments.Secondly,non-stipulated or scattered words cannot effectively be organized into sentences that provide complete or accurate semantic meanings.Thirdly,children with DLD exhibit the characteristics of using substitute utterances,arbitrarily fabricating non-sense words,or non-responses as the corresponding answers.(3)Concerning the production of verb compounds and arguments,word types and token frequencies of DVCs used by children with DLD are less produced than those in other groups.Asymmetry frequencies are generated in antonyms of the shang4 ’ascend’ group and xia4’descend’ group.Children with DLD present the semantic neutralization of lai2’come’ and qu4 ’go’ in language production.Substitutions of prototypical action verbs in children with DLD are frequently replaced by General-All-Purpose(GAP)verbs,which indicates that they can not clearly use the "instrumental features" to judge the action verbs.In addition,because children with DLD are insensitive to the features of compositionality and the unique word formations,they tend to use semantic expressions of action verbs "single-bladed features" instead of "double-bladed features." In a truth-value judgment,children with DLD can not entirely comprehend the RVCs of four argument-sharing patterns,which displays a delay in encoding of the interactive events between the two verbs and two animated arguments.These findings have been explained from the theoretical perspectives of the usage-based theory of children’s language acquisition and processing limitations in children with DLD.A comprehensive model of verb-argument structure effects has been constructed to reveal the relationships between the processing limitations and the general-domain language impairments.The major findings demonstrate that Chinese verbs have decisive functions for the acquisition of verb argument structure that are reflected in the mapping relations between the verb-arguments constitutions and cognitive impairments.The first sets of experiments can be interpreted that the limited processing of schematization and other cognitive impairments may account for the difficulties in acquiring verb frames.Besides,the preemption of frequent verbs may be the major hindrances,which can affect children with DLD’s production of novel verbs with non-constructions.The impairments in categorical capabilities may lead to difficulties in argument categories’selections of Chinese-speaking children with DLD,which can be demonstrated by the second sets of experiments.The underlying causes can be explained from different perspectives,such as global cognitive impairments,limitations in categorizations,and limitations in the acquisition of word processing,etc.The third sets of experiments suggest that children with DLD’s insufficient abilities of analogical reasoning may not combine the two verbs as a semantic package in complex operations,which may result in the rapid overloading of the cognitive system.Consequently,children with DLD’s language constructions are gradual and sporadic,reflecting the delays in making abstractions,analyzing verb island constructions,and constructing multi-word utterances.The limited capacities of analogy and other inhibitory mechanisms may account for the difficulties in the acquisition of verb compounds by children with DLD.This dissertation has implications for Chinese verb argument theories that can replenish the studies of Chinese-speaking children with DLD’s language acquisition.The establishment of verb argument structure theories for children with DLD should consider the comprehensive non-language factors rather than purely the language performance.The present study supports the developmental patterns of usage-based theories and the general-domain impairments in the acquisition of verb-argument structure by Chinese-speaking children with DLD.What is more,the present study is beneficial to the further exploration of the information processing of children with DLD’s language perception,the mechanisms of cognitive impairments,and the identification of this group and its relevant evidence-based interventions. |
