The Acquisition Of Control Constructions In Mandarin-speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment And Children With High Functioning Autism

The overlaps in the language profiles found between children with High Functioning Autism who have language impairments（hereinafter HFA-LI）and children with Specific Language Impairment（hereinafter SLI）lead to misdiagnoses in clinical treatments.Previous research indicated that typically developing（hereinafter TD）children of English and those of Mandarin would master the control constructions at an early stage of their language development,while English-speaking children with HFA-LI and those with SLI encountered some difficulties.Up to now,no comparative study has been conducted on the acquisition of control constructions in Mandarin-speaking children with HFA-LI and those with SLI.Hence,it is very likely that Mandarin children with disorders may also exhibit impairments in the acquisition of control constructions.The objective of this study is to investigate the acquisition of control constructions in Mandarin-speaking children with HFA-LI and those with SLI.Eighty-one children from the special education centers and kindergartens in Hefei,Qingdao,Guangzhou,Jiaozuo and Xi’an participated in this research,including 21SLI children,32 HFA-LI children and 28 typically developing age-matched children（hereinafter TDA）.The subject control verb daying‘promise’and the object control verb quan‘persuade’were tested in the elicited production task and the comprehension question task.Here are the research questions of this thesis.（1）Do Mandarin-speaking children with SLI and children with HFA-LI have difficulties in acquiring control constructions?（2）What are the similarities and differences between Mandarin-speaking children with SLI and children with HFA-LI in the acquisition of control constructions?（3）How to account for the similarities and differences between these two types of children in the acquisition of control constructions?The findings of this research are listed as follows.（1）The SLI children and the HFA-LI children both exhibited difficulties and had significantly worse performances than the TDA children did in the two experimental tasks.（2）The subject control verb daying‘promise’is particularly challenging for all the participants.There is no statistical significant difference between the SLI children and the HFA-LI children in the acquisition of the two control constructions.As far as the accuracy rate is concerned,the SLI children performed better than the HFA-LI children on the subject control construction,while the HFA-LI children have a higher correct answer rate on the object control construction.In light of the error patterns,the SLI children tended to utter the reversal of the first noun phrase（NP₁）and the second noun phrase（NP₂）in the production task of the subject control construction.Based on the findings and the analyses of the subject control verb daying‘promise’,we assume that participants have difficulties in integrating the knowledge of semantics,pragmatics and syntax.Their problems in breaking the minimal distance principle lead to the poor performances on this subject control construction.The fact that the SLI children in this experiment have similar performances to the younger TD children in previous studies indicates that the SLI children demonstrated a delayed language pattern on the syntactic structure of control constructions.Also,it is believed that the HFA-LI children’s poorer performances on the subject control construction can be ascribed to their deficits in building the responsibility（RESP）relation between the controller and PRO,while the SLI children’s poor comprehension of PRO in the object control construction can be imputed to their General All-Purpose（GAP）verb production.It is supposed that the SLI children’s reversal of NP₁and NP₂is mainly attributed to the difficulty in assigning the thematic roles.Hence,this study fills the gap by examining the similarities and differences in the acquisition of control constructions in Mandarin-speaking children with SLI and those with HFA-LI.This study contributes to distinguishing and diagnosing the two conditions.The deficits discovered here will help clinicians to develop more effective language training measures as well as intervention treatments.