Table_1_Early Word Order Usage in Preschool Mandarin-Speaking Typical Children and Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Influences of Caregiver Input?.DOCX

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.

本研究旨在探讨普通话使用儿童，包括典型发展（TD）儿童和自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童，在词汇顺序使用上的出现与发展及其与照看者输入频率之间的关系。共有四十二对照看者与儿童参与了时长为30分钟的录像记录的半结构化游戏互动。其中，11名ASD儿童与10名20个月大的TD儿童，以及另外11名ASD儿童与10名26个月大的TD儿童在表达性语言方面进行了匹配。本研究报告了以下四个主要发现：（1）与语言匹配的TD儿童相比，ASD儿童在幼儿阶段使用带有普遍省略的词汇顺序结构时的产生频率相似，但在SVt和VtO框架的使用上与TD儿童存在差异；（2）在TD儿童和ASD儿童中均观察到语法生产力的表现；此外，具有更高表达性语言的ASD儿童产生的语言更为多样化；（3）TD儿童和ASD儿童的照看者输入中均包含多种词汇顺序，TD儿童的输入在数量和复杂性上更为突出；然而，两组儿童的照看者在词汇顺序使用上并未显示出与年龄/语言相关的变化；（4）在照看者与儿童之间，词汇顺序特定关联性较少出现；然而，两组儿童的平均语长（MLU）之间观察到强烈的关联性：照看者产生的更长/更复杂的语句，其儿童也表现出相似的行为。综上所述，尽管ASD儿童在语用能力上存在缺陷，但接触普通话的ASD儿童在早期词汇顺序语法知识上得到了良好的保留，并总体上遵循了典型的发展模式。此外，照看者的输入在TD儿童和ASD儿童的言语发展上更为广泛而非细致地调整，并在儿童的一般句法发展中扮演了比特定词汇顺序习得更为重要的角色。因此，幼儿阶段普通话使用TD儿童和ASD儿童的早期词汇顺序使用可能受到照看者输入和儿童能力双方的共同影响。