关键词: 汉语高功能自闭症, 动词隐含因果语义, 代词加工, 语境信息

Abstract: The process of pronouns is one of the essential parts in language communication. Numerous studies have shown that individuals will use both verb-based implicit causality and context information on pronoun processing. Specially, although the implicit causality effect occurs whenever individuals encounter these verbs, the complete understanding will be obtained after the integration of semantics of verb and context information. Deficits in pragmatics are central to autism spectrum disorders (ASD), which may lead obviously to poor ability to process pronoun with information from implicit causality and context. Given this assumption, the present study investigated the performance of children with high-functioning autism (HFA) and typically developing (TD) during the process of pronouns. Besides these two types of participants, two additional factors (verb tendency and context information) was manipulated to form a 2(types of participants: HFA, TD)*2(verb tendency: NP1-based verbs, NP2-based verbs)*2(context information: with context, without context) mixed design. Eighteen children with HFA and eighteen typically developing (TD) children were matched by chronological age, verbal IQ, full-scale IQ and the capacity of working memory. All materials were recorded by a female native Chinese-Mandarin speaker, who was na?ve to the purpose of the experiment. Each sentence was digitally edited in Adobe Audition to have nearly the same length and amplitude. In order to ensure that words in sentences are easy for children to understand, familiar words were chosen like xiao3lan2, chang4ge1 and so on. Each participant finished 10 sentences in each condition and 40 ones in total presenting with Power Point.During the test, participants firstly listened sentences like Xiaogang disturbs Xiaoming because she/he is playping a trumpet. After that they would answer the questions like who is she/he? The results showed that children with HFA performed significantly worse in pronoun processing task than TD children (p = 0.002 < 0.05，η2 = 0.26). In addition, context information could place the equal beneficial effect on both groups of children to find out the objects of pronouns (p = 0.000 < 0.05，η2 = 0.41). Otherwise, there were no significant difference between types of verbs and any interaction effect. Our study provides some new insights into the language impairment of Mandarin-speaking Children with HFA, especially on the process of pronouns. These results, on one hand, indicated that Mandarin-speaking children with HFA have difficulty in comprehending pronouns. Furthermore, the main reason why HFA children have difficulty in processing pronouns is that they could not construct exact semantics representation of implicit causality verbs rather than bad performance in utilizing context information.