A Contrastive Analysis Of Multimodal Anaphoric Repair Behavior Between Chinese Children With High-Functioning Autism And Their Typically-Developing Counterparts

Anaphoric repair behavior is an important component of children’s language acquisition,reflecting their pragmatic and cognitive abilities during language development.In this study,17 children with high-functioning autism and 17 matched children with typical development were selected as subjects to investigate anaphoric repair performance from the perspective of Multimodal(Inter)action Analysis,mainly exploring the use and interaction of the verbal mode and the gestural mode.The corpus was a small self-built multimodal corpus and the annotation software was ELAN 6.2.The findings are as follows:first,in terms of the overall distribution,children in both groups who engaged in anaphoric repair behavior primarily used definite noun phrases in the verbal mode and big pointing gestures in the gestural mode.The major difference between HFA children and their peers,however,is that HFA children yielded fewer self-initiations and were dependent on their conversation partners to initiate the repair process.More differences were obtained by comparing different types of anaphoric repair entities between groups.The number of modeling gestures produced by HFA children was significantly lower than that produced by TD children when it came to repair to person.When repairing objects,HFA children used significantly more definite noun phrases to repair indefinite noun phrases and fewer gestures of big pointing,enactment and depiction than typically developing children.HFA children used significantly more deictic expressions to repair indefinite noun phrases than TD children when repairing location.Second,regarding the interaction between different modes,it was found that both groups adopted the form of one referential expression co-occurring with one gesture most frequently,and the verbal mode played a dominant role in multimodal anaphoric repair behavior.A significant difference in group performance indicated that HFA children were significantly less likely to produce multiple referential expressions co-occurring with one gesture or multiple referential expressions co-occurring with multiple gestures in the interaction of forms in comparison to their TD peers.HFA children also showed significantly lower occurrences of gestures in primary position and speech and gesture in equal positions when interacting with roles than TD children.Third,in terms of the success rate of anaphoric repair behavior,HFA children had a significantly lower success rate than their TD counterparts,suggesting that HFA children are unable to utilize multimodal resources correctly which could possibly be attributed to impairments in Theory of Mind ability as well as executive dysfunction.