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Expressive language profiles of Mandarin-speaking children with ASD
What is it about?
This study collected naturalistic language samples from 81 (74 boys, seven girls) 2- to 7-year-old (Mage = 55.6 months, SD = 15.17) Mandarin-speaking children with ASD in clinician–child interactions. The child participants were divided into five age subgroups with 12-month intervals according to their chronological age. Computer-assisted part-of-speech tagging, constituency analysis, and dependency analysis addressed the developmental trajectories of early lexical and grammatical growth in each age subgroup. The study found that Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with ASD produce more lexicons with increasing age. They preserve the noun bias as a universal mechanism in early lexical learning. Moreover, their developmental trajectories of grammatical growth were comparable in each age subgroup. In addition, their lexicons and grammar were synchronically developed during early language. acquisition.
Why is it important?
Early expressive language skills can predict long-term language outcomes in preschoolers with ASD. This study attempted to capture the expressive language profiles of 2- to 7-year-old Mandarin-speaking children with ASD in clinician–child interactions to support clinical decisions and individualized intervention plans.