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Uneven Expressive Language Development in Mandarin-Exposed Preschool Children with ASD: Comparing Vocabulary, Grammar, and the Decontextualized Use of Language via the PCDI-Toddler Form

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Abstract

Data from children with ASD who are learning Indo-European languages indicate that (a) they vary hugely in their expressive language skills and (b) their pragmatic/socially-based language is more impaired than their structural language. We investigate whether similar patterns of language development exist for Mandarin-exposed children with ASD. Parent report data of the Putonghua Communicative Development Inventory—Toddler Form were collected from 160 17–83-month-old children with ASD. These children with ASD demonstrated similar levels of variability as Western children with ASD. In particular, they could be divided into three distinct subgroups (high verbal, middle verbal, low verbal), all of which manifested relative strengths in lexical and grammatical language compared to pragmatic usage of decontextualized language.

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Notes

  1. In the present study, we consider the pragmatic skills of children with ASD to include both the narrow concept of pragmatics (i.e., is concerned with the linguistic aspect of language use, including the child’s discourse and narrative skills such as turn-taking, producing speech act, use of figurative and inferential language, etc.) and the broad concept of pragmatics (i.e., is concerned with the communicative and functional aspects of language use, such as the child’s early use of communicative gestures and joint attention). This is because we wish to focus on the natural language use of young children with ASD, which includes an integration of the linguistic, social and communicative aspects of early pragmatic development.

  2. As with the MCDI, the section of ‘How Children Use Words’ in the PCDI also contains 5 items about the frequency of the child’s use of words for the past, future, absent object (production), absent object (comprehension) and absent owner. For the purpose of analyzing expressive language in children with ASD, we only report the results of the 4 production items in the present study.

  3. We also compared results of the MV group to the Tardif et al. (2008) norms from TD boys at 22 months of age, even though their overall vocabulary trended higher (p = .06) than the MV group. We found no significant group differences on noun, t (73) = 1.24, p > .05, d = .28, word combination, χ2 = 2.62, p > .05, V = .19, and sentence complexity, t (73) = .19, p > .05, d = .04; however, the TD22 group had higher scores on the verb, pronoun, classifier, and question word lexical subcategories (ts > 2.23, ps < .05, ds > .51), and on the possessive and aspect marker grammatical items (chi-squares > 6.10, ps < .05, Vs > .29), as well as on 3 of the 4 decontextualized language items (chi-squares > 19.13, ps < .001, Vs > .51) except for ‘absent toys/animals’ which trended higher (χ2 = 3.54, p = .06, V = .22).

  4. The results were similar if we omit 9 additional children aged between 5;0 and 5;6.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31500889), Innovation-Driven Project of Central South University (2016CXS025), the Philosophy and Social Science Fund Project of Hunan Province (17YBA424), and Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (2018JJ2494) to the first author. Part of the work has been presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research (2014–2016). We gratefully acknowledge our invaluable undergraduate research assistants in data collection, as well as the children and families who participated in the study. We are grateful to the support from the teachers in the autism training centers who assisted in the execution of this project.

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  1. Child Language Lab, School of Foreign Languages, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, Hunan, China

    Yi (Esther) Su

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road, Unit 1020, Storrs, CT, 06269-1020, USA

    Letitia R. Naigles

  3. Mental Health Institute, Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, 410011, Hunan, China

    Lin-Yan Su

  4. Department of Psychiatry, The China National Clinical Research Center for Mental Health Disorders, Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, China

    Lin-Yan Su

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  1. Yi (Esther) Su
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YS and LN designed the original data collection, performed the analysis and drafted the manuscript. LYS participated in the design and coordination of the study and performed the clinical measurement. All authors approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yi (Esther) Su.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Su, Y.(., Naigles, L.R. & Su, LY. Uneven Expressive Language Development in Mandarin-Exposed Preschool Children with ASD: Comparing Vocabulary, Grammar, and the Decontextualized Use of Language via the PCDI-Toddler Form. J Autism Dev Disord 48, 3432–3448 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3614-x

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