A Narrative Analysis of Morphosyntax in Mandarin-speaking Children with Developmental Language Disorders

• In Event: 3-037 - Syntactic Development in Mandarin-Speaking Children

Integrative Statement

The domain of morphosyntax has long been known to be a domain of weakness for children with developmental language disorders (DLD). While morphosyntax has been widely studied in children with DLD speaking Indo-European languages, little is known about children with DLD speaking Mandarin, a typologically distinct language that lacks morphosyntactic affixes. Narrative analysis is useful to study morphosyntax, as children have to incorporate various linguistic components into stories. Using narrative analysis, this study aimed to identify morphosyntactic weaknesses of Mandarin-speaking children with DLD and to compare with children with DLD speaking Indo-European languages.
Eighteen Mandarin-speaking children with DLD were matched with 18 typically-developing (TD) controls on age (mean: 6;2, range: 4;3-7;11), maternal education and IQ. Children with DLD had at least one component 1.3 SD below the mean on the Diagnostic Receptive and Expressive Assessment of Mandarin (Ning, Liu, & de Villiers, 2014), and had difficulty with oral language according to pediatrician’s judgment. All children told three stories depicted on three wordless picture series.
Based on a literature review in children with DLD, we selected a number of mophosyntactic measures. We calculated total number of utterances (TNU), mean length of utterances (MLU), total number of words (TNW) and number of different words (NDW) that indicated syntactic/lexical complexity and productivity. We analysed utterance composition in four categories: simple, complex, ungrammatical and unintelligible. Additionally, we measured frequency of specific morphosyntactic features that had been reported to be difficult for Mandarin-speaking children with DLD, including classifiers, progressive aspect marker -zhe, perfective aspect marker -le, negation, relative clause, ba-construction, bei-construction.
Comparisons were made between the two groups on the above measures using multiple independent-samples t-tests and Cohen’s d. The DLD group demonstrated shorter MLU and fewer NDW, but no group differences were found for TNU and TNW (Table 1). The DLD group produced a lower percentage of complex utterances (t(34)=3.25, p=0.003) and a higher percentage of simple utterances (t(34)= -2.78, p=0.009). Particularly, both groups produced few ungrammatical utterances, and percentage of ungrammatical utterances was comparable (t(34)=-1.46, p=0.153) (Figure 1). Among the seven specific morphosyntactic features, children with DLD showed lower usage of classifiers, perfective aspect marker -le and bei-construction (Table 1).
This study identified similarities and differences in morphosyntax of children with DLD speaking Mandarin versus those speaking Indo-European languages. Consistent with many narrative studies in Indo-European languages (e.g., Guo et al., 2008), syntactic complexity (i.e., MLU, percentage of complex utterances) and lexical diversity (i.e., NDW) distinguished the two groups, but productivity measures (i.e., TNU and TNW) did not. This suggests that differences between the two groups mainly lied in linguistic sophistication, not verbosity. Unlike in Indo-European languages (e.g., Reilly et al., 2004), grammaticality was not sensitive to group membership in Mandarin. This may relate to the lack of morphosyntactic affixes in Mandarin. Children with DLD showed difficulty with three specific morphosyntactic features, which ranged from noun modifiers to verb particles and sentence structure. The results overall support the view that profiles of linguistic deficits are shaped by the ambient language (Leonard, 2014)

Authors

• Ying Hao, University of Texas, Austing
  Presenting Author

• Li Sheng, University of Delaware
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yiwen Zhang, Shanghai Children’s Medical Center Affiliated with the Medical School of Shanghai Jiao Tong University; MOE-Shanghai Key Laboratory of Children’s Environmental Health
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jiang Fan, Shanghai Children’s Medical Center Affiliated with the Medical School of Shanghai Jiao Tong University; MOE-Shanghai Key Laboratory of Children’s Environmental Health
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jill de Villiers, Smith College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Wendy Lee, Bethel Hearing and Speaking Training Center; University of Texas at Dallas Xueman Lucy Liu
  Non-Presenting Author

• Xueman Lucy Liu, Bethel Hearing and Speaking Training Center; University of Texas at Dallas
  Non-Presenting Author