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

Early Word Order Usage in Preschool Mandarin-Speaking Typical Children and Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Influences of Caregiver Input?

This study explores the emergence and productivity of word order usage in Mandarin-speaking typically-developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and examines how this emergence relates to frequency of use in caregiver input. Forty-two caregiver-child dyads participated in video-recorded 30-min semi-structured play sessions. Eleven children with ASD were matched with 10 20-month-old TD children and another 11 children with ASD were matched with 10 26-month-old TD children, on expressive language. We report four major findings: (1) Preschool Mandarin-speaking children with ASD produced word order structures with pervasive ellipsis at similar rates to language-matched TD children, but also displayed differences from TD children in their usage of SVt and VtO frames; (2) Grammatical productivity was observed in both TD children and children with ASD; moreover, children with ASD with higher expressive language produced less stereotyped language; (3) Both TD children and children with ASD heard a range of word orders in their caregivers’ input, with TD children’s input greater in amount and complexity; however, caregivers of both groups also showed no age/language-related changes in word order usage; (4) Few word-order-specific correlations emerged between caregivers and their children; however, strong correlations were observed for mean length of utterances (MLU) for both groups: Caregivers who produced longer/more complex utterances had children who did the same. Taken together, it seems that despite their pragmatic deficits, the early grammatical knowledge of word order in Mandarin-exposed children with ASD is well preserved and in general follows the typical developmental pattern. Moreover, caregiver input is broadly rather than finely tuned to the linguistic development of TD children and children with ASD, and plays a more important role in children’s general syntactic development than in specific word order acquisition. Thus, early word order usage in preschool Mandarin-speaking TD children and children with ASD may be influenced by both caregiver input and child abilities.

Online Processing of Subject-Verb-Object Order in a Diverse Sample of Mandarin-Exposed Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Grammatical comprehension remains a strength in English-exposed young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet limited research has investigated how preschool children with ASD process grammatical structures in real time, in any language. Using the eye-movement measures of Intermodal Preferential Looking, we assessed online processing of subject-verb-object (SVO) order in seventy 2- to 5-year-old children with ASD exposed to Mandarin Chinese across the spectrum, whose vocabulary production scores were dramatically delayed compared with the typical controls. With this Mandarin-exposed sample, we tested the extent to which children with ASD require (a) highly consistent input and/or (b) good discourse/pragmatics for acquiring grammatical structures. Children viewed side-by-side videos depicting reversible actions (e.g., a bird pushing a horse vs. a horse pushing a bird), and heard an audio matching only one of those actions; their eyegaze to each video was coded and analyzed. Both typically developing children and children with ASD demonstrated comprehension of SVO word order, suggesting that core grammatical structures such as basic word order may be preserved in children with ASD across languages despite radical differences in language environment, social/pragmatic abilities, and neurological organization. However, children with ASD were less efficient in online sentence processing than typical children, and the efficiency of their online sentence processing was related to their standardized language assessment scores. Of note is that across both Mandarin Chinese and English, some proportion of minimally verbal children with ASD exhibited SVO comprehension despite their profoundly impaired expressive language skills. Autism Res 2019, 12: 1829-1844. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Grammar is a strength in the language comprehension of young English learners with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Eye-movement data from a diverse sample of Chinese preschoolers with ASD indicated similar grammatical strength of basic word order in Chinese (e.g., to understand sentences like "The bird is pushing the horse"). Moreover, children's proficiency of sentence processing was related to their language assessment scores. Across languages, such knowledge is even spared in some minimally verbal children with ASD.

Comprehending conjunctive entailment of disjunction among individuals with Asperger syndrome

Although individuals with Asperger syndrome (AS) are often described to be semantic-pragmatic disordered, it is still unclear to what extent their semantic comprehension is impaired. The primary goal of this study is to understand the sentence comprehension of adults with AS by investigating their reading processes of sentences involving the conjunctive entailment of disjunction. More specifically, their on-line processes of reading globally ambiguous sentences containing huo 'or' in Mandarin Chinese, which can be understood as either a conjunction or a disjunction in simple negative statements, were recorded. The results indicated that both AS and typically developing groups tended to interpret the ambiguous huo as a conjunction. Additionally, both groups consistently spent significantly more time judging the appropriateness of disjunction-biased sentences. It is argued that, for adults with AS, at least some aspects of semantic knowledge are intact. Future studies are suggested to focus on different sentence types to further explore to what extent that semantics is impaired among individuals with AS.