The Production of Relatives in Mandarin Children With Specific Language Impairment-From the Perspective of Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis.

Haiyan Wang,Haopeng Yu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.705526

Abstract

This paper is a first attempt to investigate the production of Relative Clauses (RCs) in Mandarin children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (aged 4; 5 to 6; 0) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The data from a preference choice task suggested that (i) Children with SLI performed better on the subject-gapped than object-gapped RC; (ii) Children with SLI performed substantially worse than their TD peers on the RCs production; (iii) Children with SLI were more inclined to omitting the complementizer and using simple sentences and sentence fragments as avoidance strategies. The Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis may explain not only the asymmetry of production seen in children with SLI, but also the presence of errors and avoidance strategies used by this population in the task.

Highlights

Almost all studies on languages with head-initial Relative Clauses (RCs) found a preference for subject RCs in production, whereas the results on the production of Mandarin RCs are inconsistent: a primacy for subject RCs, object RCs or no asymmetry in the production (e.g., Su, 2006; Hsu et al, 2009; Chen and Shirai, 2015; Hu et al, 2015)
We fitted targeted RCs responses to a mixed-effects model using sentence type and group (SLI, TD children with Age Matched (TDA), TDY) as fixed factors, but the interaction between the two fixed factors was excluded in the model, and subjects and items as random factors
The results showed a significant effect of sentence type (x2 = 4.05, p = 0.04; Wald Z = −2.01, p = 0.04), indicating that object RCs are more difficult to produce

Summary

Introduction

Almost all studies on languages with head-initial RCs found a preference for subject RCs in production, whereas the results on the production of Mandarin RCs are inconsistent: a primacy for subject RCs, object RCs or no asymmetry in the production (e.g., Su, 2006; Hsu et al, 2009; Chen and Shirai, 2015; Hu et al, 2015). To date, there are few studies that investigated the production of RCs in Mandarin children with SLI. The first focus of this paper is to establish whether there is a primacy for subject-gapped RCs (subject RCs) or object-gapped RCs (object RCs) production in this population. It is well acknowledged from a variety of studies that children with SLI have problems with the production of RCs (e.g., Novogrodsky and Friedmann, 2006; Jensen de López et al, 2014; Adani et al, 2016). We propose the Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis (EFUH; Yu, 2018; Yu et al, in press) to provide a better explanation of syntactic deficit in children with SLI

Methods

Results

Conclusion