Acquisition of Grammatical Aspect by Mandarin-Speaking Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Background: Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties producing aspect markers. The difficulties were explained in terms of pragmatic deficits since these children demonstrated strength in the comprehension of aspect markers using the Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) task. Aims: To verify whether this dissociation between production and comprehension could be replicated using another technique to the IPL, and if all children with ASD show difficulties in the production of aspect markers. Methods & Procedures: A total of 34 children with ASD without cognitive delay, half with language impairment (ALI; mean age = 61.25 months old) and half with normal language (ALN, mean age = 61.52 months old), as well as 17 age-matched typically developing (TD) children (mean age = 61.38 months old) participated in a sentence-picture-matching task and a priming picture-description task to investigate their comprehension and production of Mandarin aspect markers "zai"-, -"le" and -"zhe." Outcomes & Results: In the comprehension task, children in the ALN group performed similarly to their TD peers, but those in the ALI group were less accurate on "zai"- and -"le" than TD children; children in all groups received higher accuracy when "zai"- was combined with Activity rather than Accomplishment verbs, and those in the ALI group was also more accurate when -"le" occurred with Achievement verbs, in contrast to Activity verbs. In the production task, children in the ALI group produced fewer targets and more irrelevant sentences with "zai"- than their TD peers, and they tended to produce bare verbs for -"le" and -"zhe" than TD children; children in all groups tended to combine "zai"- with Activity verbs, and those in the ALN group also tended to combine -"le" with Achievement verbs. Conclusions & Implications: The comprehension and production of Mandarin aspect markers by children with ASD are linked to general language abilities, and interactions between lexical and grammatical aspect. Patterns of performance are similar to those of TD peers only for the subgroup with spared global language, while pragmatic deficits are pervasive throughout the spectrum. Therefore, training on formal language, with a specific emphasis on aspectual rather than pragmatic abilities, may be more effective at enhancing the production of aspect markers.