Pronoun Reversals In Mandarin-Speaking Preschool Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Extensive research had reported that the acquisition of personal pronouns was a challenge for children with autism spectrum disorders(ASD),with pronoun reversal being one of the most wellknown difficulties.Pronoun reversal is a kind of deictic error which refers to use “I” for “you” and vice versa,and has long been considered a“common” and widely used language deficit in children with ASD,and it was even included in ASD diagnostic criteria.Recent research,on the other hand,has found a low prevalence of pronoun reversal in children with ASD,implying that pronoun reversal is not a common linguistic handicap in children with ASD any longer.These contradictory findings call for more investigation into children with ASD who speak typologically distinct languages.Up to now,there are few studies investigating Mandarin-speaking children with ASD’s pronoun reversal.Therefore,the current study examines pronoun reversal in Mandarinspeaking children with ASD and evaluates the impact of several factors on pronoun reversals.The present study investigated the spontaneous speech of 50 children with ASD(mean age in month: 27.75 ± 5.46;vocabulary scores:547.22 ± 249.61;MLU: 2.41 ± 0.7)and 59 language-matched typically developing(TD)children(mean age in month: 54.84 ±13.67;vocabulary scores: 502.54 ± 193.45;MLU: 2.2 ± 0.57).Children(together with their parents)took part in a 30-minute semi-structured game that was videotaped the entire time.The conversation was then manually transcribed by postgraduates majoring in linguistics via Child Language Data Exchange System(CHILDES)to build a self-constructed corpus.Based on prior literature,we computed and categorized reversed pronouns out of the singular of first and second person pronouns,as well as affecting factors.The important findings of are as follows.Results indicate that a low percentage of pronoun reversal in children with ASD(3.76%±9.25%),with no significant difference between TD children and children with ASD,confirming recent findings that pronoun reversal is not a common language deficit unique to children with ASD across languages.Additionally,results show that language and social cognitive skills are unrelated to pronoun reversal.Language and social cognition abilities,on the other hand,were shown to be positively correlated with the production of first-person pronouns,implying that these two factors may contribute to pronoun acquisition.Furthermore,parents of children with ASD with high pronoun reversal rate produced more total number of words,implying that children with ASD’s parents were concerned about their children’s pronoun reversal and attempted to remedy it.The relationship between children with ASD’s mean length of utterances and their parents implies that the longer the mean length of utterances of parents is,the better the autistic children’s overall language development would be.Moreover,Children with ASD’s second person pronoun reversal is significantly more in the imitative utterances of parental statements,showing that imitation is one of the factors influencing autistic children’s pronoun reversal.Besides,the percentage of second person pronoun reversal is higher than the percentage of first person pronoun reversal in both the TD and ASD groups,which might be related to parental input and egocentrism in TD children or deficits in social interaction in children with ASD.In conclusion,the present study suggests that pronoun reversal is not prevalent in children with ASD across languages.Language and social cognitive skills are unrelated to pronoun reversal.But parental input,children’s usage of person,and children’s imitation of parental utterances are major influencing factors on reversals for children with ASD.