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ABSTRACT
This study investigated the comprehension and production of long passives (i.e. bei-constructions with an overt agent) in Mandarin-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Seventeen preschool children with DLD (1 female; mean age: 61 months old) and 23 typically developing (TD) children (6 females; mean age: 62 months old) participated in a sentence-picture matching task (for comprehension) and an elicited production task. Their nonverbal working memory (NVWM) was measured with the fourth edition of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence. Results showed that children with DLD were less accurate and more likely to choose the picture with reversed thematic roles than their TD peers on passives in the sentence-picture matching task; in the elicited production task, they produced fewer target responses than TD children in passives. For NVWM, although that of the DLD group was lower than that of TD children, most children in the DLD group were within the average range. Furthermore, their performance on passives in the comprehension and production tasks was significantly correlated with their NVWM, which adds to the body of work suggesting links between complex syntax and working memory. However, the fact that NVWM could be preserved in the face of difficulties with passives suggests that this link may be due to NVWM enhancing performance during tasks with a high visual component, while it may not be underlyingly responsible for syntactic impairments in children with DLD.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the children, parents, teachers and therapists who participated in the study and to our research team in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, especially Ms. Yunting Wang, whose collaboration made the study possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Target sentences were modelled by one of the experimenters (E1) before the participant gave his/her answer in Leonard et al. (Citation2006), as exampled in the following.
E1: The bird wants to throw something.
Bird: Should I throw the airplane or the baseball?
Child: the baseball (Bird then throws the baseball) The bear wants to hug someone.
Bear: Should I hug Ernie or Snow White?
Child: Snow White (Bear then hugs Snow White)
Freddy: I wasn’t paying attention. What just happened?
E1: Let’s tell Freddy what happened to the ball and what happened to Snow White. The baseball got thrown by the bird and …….
2 The passives in Mandarin can also be expressed through other morphemes such as jiao, gei, and rang.
3 The ba-construction is another non-canonical structure of the default active SVO structure. In the ba-construction, the object of an SVO sentence surfaces as the object of ba in the ba-construction to receive an emphatic reading associated with a resultative subevent.
4 In the RSPCLD-R or RSSCLD-R, the comprehension and production of global language abilities are tested, including semantics, syntax, pragmatics and vocabulary.
5 The standard score ranges of WPPSI-IV are divided in to seven levels: below 70 is extremely low, 70–79 is borderline, 80–89 is low average, 90–109 is average, 110–119 is high average, 120–129 is superior, and above 130 is very superior (The Test Tour, Citation2016).
6 In this study, Hedges’ g value was used to measure the effect size of the parametric tests, r value was used to evaluate the effect size of the non-parametric tests.
7 It is controversial whether syntactic priming reflects shorter-term activation of syntactic knowledge (Pickering & Branigan, Citation1998) or implicit learning (Bock & Griffin, Citation2000). Since NVWM of TD children was not significantly correlated with their performance on passives, it is not immediately obvious that syntactic priming sufficed to provide short-term activation of syntactic knowledge.
8 Significant correlations between NVI of children with DLD and their comprehension and production of passives were found in this study, comprehension: r = 0.489, p = .012, production: r = 0.554, p = .004.