Use of Aspect Markers by Mandarin-speaking Children with High-Functioning Autism Plus Language Impairment and Children with Developmental Language Disorder

Introduction: This study investigates the comprehension and production of four typical Mandarin aspect markers zai-,-le,-zhe, and-guo by preschool children with high functioning autism plus language impairment (HFA-LI) and those with developmental language disorder (DLD), by comparing them with typically developing age-matched (TDA) children.Methods: Twenty children with HFA-LI (M/F: 18/2; mean age: 5.20), 20 with DLD (M/F: 11/9; mean age: 5.25), and 20 TDA children (M/F:14/6; mean age:5.27) completed a picture-choice task and priming picture-description task. The results were analyzed using non-parametric methods.Results: In the comprehension task, the HFA-LI and DLD groups achieved lower accuracy than the TDA group on zai-,-le, and-guo. The comprehension of aspect markers in the HFA-LI and DLD groups was affected by lexical aspect. In the production task, the HFA-LI and DLD groups pro-duced fewer sentences with the target aspect marker for all four aspect markers than the TDA group. However, they produced more sentences with bare verb forms for zai-and-guo than the TDA group. Furthermore, all three groups tended to combine aspect markers with their seman-tically inherent types of verbs (e.g, zai-+Activity verbs). The HFA-LI group produced more sen-tences irrelevant to the task than the other two groups for-zhe and-guo, and some children in the HFA-LI group produced ungrammatical sentences in which both the progressive zai-and perfective-le were used.Conclusions: Children with HFA-LI and DLD demonstrate similarities in the comprehension and production of Mandarin aspect markers, given their poor comprehension of the aspect markers zai-,-le and-guo, and poor production of all four aspect markers compared to their TDA peers. Their performance was also impacted by lexical aspect.