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

Peng Zhou*, Stephen Crain, Liqun Gao, Ye Tang, Meixiang Jia

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

24 Citations (Scopus)

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1428-1436
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
Volume45
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 May 2015

Keywords

  • Autism
  • Event structure
  • Grammatical morphology
  • Language development
  • Temporal processing

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