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The Use of Grammatical Morphemes by Mandarin-Speaking Children with High Functioning Autism

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Abstract

The present study investigated the production of grammatical morphemes by Mandarin-speaking children with high functioning autism. Previous research found that a subgroup of English-speaking children with autism exhibit deficits in the use of grammatical morphemes that mark tense. In order to see whether this impairment in grammatical morphology can be generalised to children with autism from other languages, the present study examined whether or not high-functioning Mandarin-speaking children with autism also exhibit deficits in using grammatical morphemes that mark aspect. The results show that Mandarin-speaking children with autism produced grammatical morphemes significantly less often than age-matched and IQ-matched TD peers as well as MLU-matched TD peers. The implications of these findings for understanding the grammatical abilities of children with autism were discussed.

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Notes

  1. Williams et al. (2008) reanalysed Roberts et al.’s data and made a case against Roberts et al.’s claim that impairments in tense marking in autism resemble those observed in SLI.

  2. One reviewer correctly pointed out that though –le was used in these echolalic responses, this does not reflect a productive capacity to use this morpheme. In fact, the finding that the participants who produced the zuo-le structure always used the perfective morpheme –le provided further evidence attesting to the echolalic nature of their responses, because these participants were adhering to the exact verb forms they heard.

  3. To date there are no standardised tests that can be used to assess Mandarin-speaking children’s language development.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Macquarie University Research Fellowship to the first author and also the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CE110001021). The authors are grateful to Dr. Joshua John Diehl and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the paper. The authors would also like to thank the children and the teachers at the Rehabilitation and Education Centre for Children with Autism affiliated with the Peking University Sixth Hospital, Beijing, China, for their assistance and support in running the experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognitive Science, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia

    Peng Zhou & Stephen Crain

  2. Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, 100083, China

    Liqun Gao & Ye Tang

  3. Peking University Sixth Hospital, Beijing, 100083, China

    Meixiang Jia

Authors
  1. Peng Zhou
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  2. Stephen Crain
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  3. Liqun Gao
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  4. Ye Tang
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  5. Meixiang Jia
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peng Zhou.

Appendix: Mandarin Version of the Example Instructions Used in the Task

Appendix: Mandarin Version of the Example Instructions Used in the Task

1.:

Mandarin instruction: “你看, 我这儿有两幅画。 我来说第一幅, 然后你告诉我第二 幅, 好吗”

English translation: “Look. I have two pictures. I will describe the first one, and you tell me about the second one.”

2.:

Mandarin instruction: “你看, 这儿有一个小男孩, 他在画板上画小猫”

English translation: “Look. Here is a boy drawing a cat.”

3.:

Mandarin instruction: “现在呢, 画画结束。 告诉我小男孩干了什么”

English translation “Now he is done with the drawing. Tell me what the boy did.”

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Zhou, P., Crain, S., Gao, L. et al. The Use of Grammatical Morphemes by Mandarin-Speaking Children with High Functioning Autism. J Autism Dev Disord 45, 1428–1436 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-014-2304-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-014-2304-6

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