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Comprehension of grammatical aspect markers le and zai in a diverse sample of Mandarin-exposed preschool children with autism spectrum disorder

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Abstract

Vulnerability of morphosyntactic production, including grammatical aspect, has been identified in at least some children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exposed to typologically different languages. However, Tovar et al. (2015) found strengths in comprehending grammatical aspect in English-exposed children with ASD, suggesting that the challenges in production are pragmatically based. Using the eye-movement measures of Intermodal Preferential Looking, this study further explored whether Mandarin-exposed preschoolers with ASD were able to map aspect morphemes onto their distinct meanings in comprehension, despite their apparent impairments in aspect production. The results revealed that a diverse sample of 2–6-year-old Mandarin-exposed children with ASD demonstrated similar patterns of comprehending the perfective morpheme le and the progressive morpheme zai as younger 1–3-year-old TD children, even though the children with ASD’s vocabulary production scores were dramatically delayed. Specifically, both groups of children associated the perfective morpheme le with the completed action and the progressive morpheme zai with the ongoing action. Our findings suggest that despite their apparent deficits of using/producing grammatical aspect, comprehension of grammatical aspect is a strength in children with ASD across languages. Moreover, grammatical aspect appears to be preserved in children with ASD, despite their pragmatic deficits and vocabulary disadvantages. The experimental findings shed light on the sharp contrast between linguistic competence versus linguistic performance in autistic grammatical acquisition. Furthermore, the results highlight the dissociation between the grammatical vs. the pragmatic and lexical language modules in children with ASD.

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Notes

  1. The morpheme le has multiple functions in Mandarin Chinese, including being (i) an aspect marker that immediately follows a verb and signals perfective aspect, (ii) a sentence-final morpheme that indicates inchoativity or currently relevant state, and (iii) a phonetically reduced form of the resultative verb complement liao ‘finish’ (Chao, 1968; Li & Thompson, 1981; Smith, 1991). Thus, le doesn’t necessarily signal completion. However, in our test sentences, le is most likely to be interpreted this way because it immediately follows a transitive verb and is not utterance final. Additionally, the test sentences were accompanied by side-by-side completed/ongoing events suitable for assessing the aspectual meanings; if the children conjectured other interpretations for le, they should not show a preference for either of the two events.

  2. Because the ASD and TD groups were not matched on language, significant group effects will be reported with PCDI scores added as a covariate.

  3. This df value of 103 is not consistent with the previous ones of 105, due to the missing data of 2 participants’ PCDI scores.

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Funding

This study was funded by the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant Number 20BYY086).

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Authors and Affiliations

  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

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  1. Yi (Esther) Su
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Both authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Yi (Esther) Su and Letitia R. Naigles. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Yi (Esther) Su and both authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yi (Esther) Su.

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All parents of the child participants signed consent forms for participation, which were approved by the Medical Ethics Committee of the Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University.

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Su, Y., Naigles, L.R. Comprehension of grammatical aspect markers le and zai in a diverse sample of Mandarin-exposed preschool children with autism spectrum disorder. Read Writ 36, 1369–1392 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10214-w

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