Mentally Disabled Children Chinese Verb Argument Structure Research

Argument structure is one of the major research areas in modern linguistic research. However, there is a severe lack of research in this area regarding mentally retarded children. This paper underwent MLU-based matching, choosing21of each mentally retarded and typically developing children, and through the use of picture description tasks, further research into the processing of verbal argument structure of mentally retarded children from the two angles of argument complexity and argument representation.This essay first analyzed the influence of sentence length, and discovered that for both groups of subjects, sentence length had no notable influence, meaning that due to their more advanced age, the processing abilities of the mentally retarded children surpassed the limits imposed by sentence length. This research also discovered a relationship between age and sentence length, and processing ability.Having established that sentence length as a non-factor, this paper researched the argument complexity of mentally retarded children, discovering that argument quantity is a major factor as to the omission of the subject by mentally retarded children, thereby establishing that argument quantity as an influence across all languages. Although the results show that argument complexity has a certain effect, the gradient curve was not as significant as had been predicted by the verb argument structure complexity, showing that the effects of argument structure complexity differ across languages.In order to research the effect of argument structure representation on mentally retarded children, this paper researches from the dual aspects of the optional subject period and syntactic-semantic representation. Results show that the optional subject period has no effect on Mandarin Chinese mentally retarded children and typically developing children alike, high lighting a characteristic of Mandarin. This shows that the optional subject period does not exist in some languages, as it exists in languages such as English, but not in Mandarin Chinese.An analysis of incorrect argument structure shows that the representation of verbal argument structure of mentally retarded children is incomplete or damaged, particularly for class three verbs, meaning that it is possible mentally retarded children have a flawed semantic representation of verbs within their lexicon, as well as flawed syntactic categorization framework and argument framework, and are unable to correctly link argument syntax and semantics, causing the extensive misuse of argument structure.From the above, it can be seen that the number of the argument and argument representation processing of mentally retarded children are not completely independent of each other, and in fact, are the combined cause of argument structure deficits in mentally retarded children, also representing the fact that overall processing ability and language knowledge influenced the subjects’ language processing.Furthermore, after comparing with typically developing children, it was discovered that mentally retarded children were significantly impaired in their abilities to process argument structure.