Psychological Development and Education ›› 2021, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (4): 481-488.doi: 10.16187/j.cnki.issn1001-4918.2021.04.04

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Pronouns Processing in Mandarin-speaking Children with High-functioning Autism: Use of Mention Order Cue and Accent Cue

WANG Han1, YU Jiayu2, LIANG Dandan2   

  1. 1. Zhonghua Road Primary School, Wuhan 430060;
    2. School of Chinese Language and Culture, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210000
  • Published:2021-07-26

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Abstract: The current study applied sentence comprehension task to investigate whether 5~7 years old Mandarin-speaking children with high-functioning autism can use the sole mention order cue and co-occur mention order and accent cues to process pronouns. The result of the first experiment indicates that Mandarin-speaking children with high-functioning autism randomly chose the references of the pronouns, which means they cannot use mention order alone to process pronouns. However, 5~7 years old typically developing children whose IQ and working memory span are matched with the children with high-functioning autism can use this cue to choose the reference of the pronoun. When the mention order cue appears simultaneously with accent cue, no matter the accent order cue is congruency or incongruency with the mention order cue, typically developing children show the tendency to rely on the accent cue to process the pronouns. However, the children with high-functioning autism were insensitive to these cues, still randomly chose the references of the pronouns. The results of the two experiments indicate that 5~7 years old mandarin-speaking children with high-functioning autism cannot use mention order cue and accent cue to process pronouns, in other words, it is difficult for they to process pronouns by the discourse prominence cues.

Key words: mandarin-speaking children with high-functioning autism, pronoun processing, mention order, accent

CLC Number: 

  • B844
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