The Association of Phonological Disorders and Syntactic Disorders- A Study of Mandarin-speaking Children

• Main Authors: Hsin-jen Hsu, 許馨仁
• Other Authors: Hintat Cheung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/79910344326592889208

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 語言學研究所 === 91 === The present study aims to explore the association of phonological deficits and syntactic deficits in children with phonological disorders and phonologic-syntactic disorders. 34 Mandarin-speaking children, who were diagnosed to have developmental phonological disorders, were recruited from three hospitals in Taipei. With standardized tests on their expressive and receptive language abilities, the 34 children were further classified into two groups: the phonological disorders group (PD, n=20) and the phonologic-syntactic disorders group (PSD, n=14). Two control groups, one age-matched group and one younger group, were also examined. A total of seven tasks were administered to examine phonological, memory, and grammatical capacities in the four groups. Of the phonological capacity, a picture naming task and a new word learning task were used to investigate the children’s phonetic inventory and their capacity in imitating and discriminating minimal pairs. Of the memory capacity, a word span task and a nonword repetition task were included to examine the children’s maximal span in recalling spoken word lists and their phonological working memory capacity. In addition, the children’s morphosyntactic ability were examined with a set of classifier task, and a sentence comprehension task and a sentence construction task were also conducted to investigate their syntactic performance. Our results showed different phonological problems between the two disordered groups. For the PD group, the breakdown might be on articulatory level of motor planning or motor executive, while the PSD group the general phonological system. In addition, poorer performances in tasks on morphosyntactic and syntactic abilities were found in the PSD group, as compared with the other three groups. In fact, this discrepancy in grammatical abilities between the PD group and the PSD group was not unpredictable based on their phonological differences. As proposed by Bishop (1997), once a child evidence difficulty on receptive side of language processing such as phonological segmentation, difficulties at higher level of language processing and developing such as syntax would also occur. Since the children in the PSD group evidence impairments in their general phonological system, deficits in grammatical ability such as sentence comprehension could thus be inferred. For the PD group, on the contrary, since the major phonological difficulties was on motor level, it is possible for them to free from such difficulties in the process of grammatical development.