Comprehension of Grammatical Aspect Markers 'le' and 'zai' in a Diverse Sample of Mandarin-Exposed Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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.