Dai Huilin, He Xiaowei, Yu Haopeng, Wang Yunting, Hu Shuang
School of Foreign Languages, Shaoyang University, Shaoyang, China.
Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2025 Jul 25. doi: 10.1007/s10803-025-06957-y.
There is considerable debate over the similarities and differences between developmental language disorder (DLD) and autism spectrum disorder plus language impairment (ALI). Few studies have compared these in terms of complex syntactic operations. This study aimed to explore the similarities and differences between children with DLD and children with ALI via investigating the effects of syntactic complexity operationalized in terms of movement and intervention in Mandarin passives and wh-questions. Fifteen Mandarin-speaking children with DLD (mean age = 60.73 months), sixteen children with ALI (mean age = 64.90 months) and twenty-five typically developing age-matched (TDA) children (mean age = 62.03 months) participated in a picture-choice task and a character-picture task. Lower-than-TDA performance and similar patterns of non-target responses were observed in the DLD and ALI groups. Short-long passive asymmetry was found in the two groups. However, who-which-question asymmetry was identified only in the ALI group, with a significant difference between who- and which-questions found only in the ALI group. Syntactic complexity affected the DLD and ALI groups similarly. The primary deficit lies in establishing a local relationship between a moved phrase and its trace in thematic role transmission when an intervenor is present. A slight difference between the two groups illustrates that DLD and ALI are not identical in language impairment, despite sharing common symptoms. This may be due to problems of children with ALI with referentiality. These findings suggest that non-target responses in language tests are worthy of in-depth analysis to confirm language disorders.
关于发育性语言障碍（DLD）与自闭症谱系障碍合并语言障碍（ALI）之间的异同存在大量争论。很少有研究从复杂句法操作的角度对二者进行比较。本研究旨在通过调查以移位和干预来操作化的句法复杂性对汉语被动句和特殊疑问句的影响，来探索患有DLD的儿童与患有ALI的儿童之间的异同。15名说汉语的DLD儿童（平均年龄 = 60.73个月）、16名ALI儿童（平均年龄 = 64.90个月）和25名年龄匹配的发育正常（TDA）儿童（平均年龄 = 62.03个月）参与了图片选择任务和人物-图片任务。在DLD组和ALI组中观察到低于TDA组的表现以及类似的非目标反应模式。两组中均发现了长短被动句不对称现象。然而，只有ALI组中发现了who-which-特殊疑问句不对称现象，且只有ALI组中who-疑问句和which-疑问句之间存在显著差异。句法复杂性对DLD组和ALI组的影响相似。主要缺陷在于当存在干预成分时，在题元角色传递中，移位短语与其语迹之间建立局部关系方面。两组之间的细微差异表明，尽管DLD和ALI有共同症状，但在语言障碍方面并不完全相同。这可能是由于ALI儿童存在指称性问题。这些发现表明，语言测试中的非目标反应值得深入分析，以确认语言障碍。
