A STUDY OF THE ACQISITION OF THE BEI AND BA CONSTRUCTIONS IN MANDARIN-SPEAKING CHILDREN: A GROUP-COMPARISON BETWEEN CHILDREN WITH AND WITHOUT SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT

• Main Authors: Lin Yi-cheng, 林怡呈
• Other Authors: Hsin Ai-li
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/u33b9m

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 99 === The focus of the present study is the acquisition and language performance and development of the Chinese bei and ba constructions of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) compared with that of typically developing (TD) children. Subjects were nine children with SLI aged from 5;9 to 8;10 and thirty children with normal language development. The TD children were further divided into three groups according to their age: TD1 aged from 6;8 to 7;4, TD2 aged from 5;8 to 6;5 and TD3 aged from 4;7 to 5;6. Two experiments were conducted in the study, the Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJ task) and the Elicited Production Task (EP task) to examine the subjects’ competence of the bei and ba constructions in Mandarin Chinese. The subjects were asked to judge seventy sentences in the GJ Task and produce twenty sentences with the given verbs in the EP Task. The results show that in the GJ Task, the children with SLI had no significant difference on judging sentences of canonical SVO order; however, their performance on the bei and the ba constructions, which involve movement in the sentence and have more complex structures, was substantially worse than that of TD1 and TD2 and was more similar with that of TD3. In the EP Task, children with SLI also had the shortest MLU and worst performance compared with the other three groups. Many sentences the children with SLI produced were incomplete and the structures they adopted were less various. Based on the results above, the children with SLI had inferior language ability to TD children especially when they encounter sentences with complex structures.