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Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders

Gepubliceerd in:

09-11-2016 | Original Paper

The Use of Linguistic Cues in Sentence Comprehension by Mandarin-Speaking Children with High-Functioning Autism

Auteurs: Peng Zhou, Stephen Crain, Liqun Gao, Meixiang Jia

Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders | Uitgave 1/2017

Abstract

Two studies were conducted to investigate how high-functioning children with autism use different linguistic cues in sentence comprehension. Two types of linguistic cues were investigated: word order and morphosyntactic cues. The results show that children with autism can use both types of cues in sentence comprehension. However, compared to age-matched typically developing peers, children with autism relied significantly more on word order cues and exhibited significantly more difficulties in interpreting sentences in which there was a conflict between the morphosyntactic cue and the word order cue. We attribute the difficulties exhibited by children with autism to their deficits in executive function. We then discuss the implications of the findings for understanding the nature of the sentence processing mechanism in autism.

vorige artikel Perception of Life as Stressful, Not Biological Response to Stress, is Associated with Greater Social Disability in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

volgende artikel Design and Cohort Characteristics of the Social Spectrum Study: A Multicenter Study of the Autism Spectrum Among Clinically Referred Children

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We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing out these possibilities. We also wish to note that the term “reanalysis” entails “paying attention”, because in order to reanalyse the thematic roles, children first have to pay attention to the morphosyntactic cues. Thereafter we will use the phrase “children’s difficulties with reanalysis” to indicate all the three possibilities: they fail to pay attention to the morphosyntactic cue, or they fail to reanalyse the thematic roles using the morphosyntactic cue, or both, just for ease of explanation.

We refer to BA and BEI as morphosyntactic markers instead of case markers, as would be typically found in Indo-European languages, because BA and BEI are free standing morphemes. Unlike morphological markers in Indo-European languages, BA and BEI do not constitute an integral part of the words with which they occur, i.e., they are not bound to the words they modify and do not undergo phonological assimilations to the words. But, functionally, BA and BEI are equivalent to the case markers in Indo-European languages.

Throughout the text, PERF is used to indicate a perfective morpheme in Mandarin Chinese. In Mandarin, the perfective morpheme –le (see (1)) indicates the completion of an event.

Huang et al. (2013) investigated the comprehension of BA- and BEI-constructions by 5-year-old typically developing Mandarin-speaking children. Their studies focused on typically developing children’s online sentence comprehension and used the visual world paradigm of eye tracking. Since the research focus and methodologies between their studies and ours are very different, the details of their studies are not reviewed here.

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Titel: The Use of Linguistic Cues in Sentence Comprehension by Mandarin-Speaking Children with High-Functioning Autism
Auteurs: Peng Zhou
Stephen Crain
Liqun Gao
Meixiang Jia
Publicatiedatum: 09-11-2016
Uitgeverij: Springer US
Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders / Uitgave 1/2017
Print ISSN: 0162-3257
Elektronisch ISSN: 1573-3432
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-016-2912-4

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