动词隐含因果语义对5～7岁汉语高功能自闭症儿童代词加工的影响

The Influence of Verbs’ Implicit Causality on Pronouns Processing of 5～7 Years Old Mandarin-Speaking Children with High Functioning Autism

个体在利用动词隐含因果语义线索确定代词所指的过程中会结合动词语义特征和语境两个方面的信息,已有研究指出自闭症儿童在语言加工过程中无法有效利用语境信息,本研究采用句子理解任务,考察有无语境支持和不同动词类型(主语隐含型和宾语隐含型)四种条件下,汉语高功能自闭症儿童利用动词隐含因果语义信息加工代词的能力。结果显示,(1)汉语高功能自闭症儿童的代词加工表现显著差于典型发展儿童;(2)语境信息可以帮助被试确定代词所指,且对两组被试成绩的提高程度相当。以上结果表明汉语高功能自闭症儿童之所以无法利用动词的隐含因果语义线索确定代词所指的原因可能是他们对该类动词的语义表征存在问题。

The processing of pronouns plays an essential role in language communication.Numerous studies have shown that individuals will use both verb-based implicit causality and context information on pronoun processing.Especially,though the implicit causality effect occurs whenever the individuals encounter these verbs,the thorough understanding will be obtained after the integration of the meaning of verbs and context information.Almost no study has been conducted to investigate whether children with autism could complete the processing of pronouns under such circumstances.Deficits in pragmatics are central to autism spectrum disorders(ASD),which may lead to the poor ability to process pronouns with information from implicit causality and context.Given this assumption,the present study investigates the performance of children with high-functioning autism(HFA)and typically developing(TD)when they process pronouns.Besides these two types of participants,two additional factors(verb tendency and context information)are manipulated to form a 2(types of participants:HFA,TD)×2(verb tendency:NP1-based verbs,NP2-based verbs)×2(context information:with context,without context)mixed design.Eighteen children with HFA and eighteen typically developing(TD)children are matched by chronological age,verbal IQ,full-scale IQ and the capacity of working memory.All materials are recorded by a female native Chinese-Mandarin speaker,who is unaware of the purpose of the experiment.Each sentence is digitally edited in Adobe Audition to have nearly the same length and amplitude.In order to ensure that words in sentences are easy for children to understand,familiar words were chosen like xiao3 lan2,chang4 ge1 and so on.Each participant finishes 10 sentences in each condition,and 40 sentences in total are presented with PowerPoint.During the test,participants firstly listen to sentences like Xiaogang disturbs Xiaoming because she/he is playing a trumpet.After that they would answer the questions like who is she/he?The whole experiment lasts for nearly half an hour.The scores of TD children are notably higher than random level in all conditions.However,HFA children answer the questions randomly when there is no context information(p>.05,p>.05).The results of inter group comparison show that children with HFA perform significantly worse in pronoun processing task than TD children(p=.002<.05,η~2=.26).In addition,context information could place the equal beneficial effect on both groups of children to find out the objects of pronouns(p=.000<.05,η~2=.41).Otherwise,there is no significant difference between types of verbs and any interaction effect.Our study provides some new insights into the language impairment of 5~7 Mandarin-speaking Children with HFA,especially on the process of pronouns.These results,on one hand,indicates that Mandarin-speaking children with HFA have difficulty in comprehending pronouns;On the other hand,these children could use context information to define pronoun references to some degree.Given these results,we suppose the main reason why HFA children have difficulty in processing pronouns is that they could not construct exact semantics representation of implicit causality verbs rather than bad performance in utilizing context information.