Aspectual Production in Preschool Mandarin‑Speaking Autistic Children Plus Language Impairment

Aiming to determine whether the linguistic deficits observed in autistic children with language impairment (ALI) represent a qualitative deviance or a quantitative delay in grammatical development, this study adopted a priming picture-description task to examine the production of four Mandarin aspect markers (zai-, -zhe, -le, -guo) among 4- to 6-year-old preschool autistic children with ALI (mean age = 5;5 years), with age-matched typically developing (TD) children (mean age = 5;4 years) serving as a control group. The results showed that children with ALI produced significantly fewer utterances with -zhe and -guo than TD peers, while both groups used zai-, -zhe, and -le far more frequently than -guo. Unlike TD children who preferred verb-final -le, children with ALI showed a pronounced tendency to use sentence-final -le (a developmentally earlier form than the verb-final -le). Additionally, children with ALI had a stronger inclination to collocate -le with Achievement verbs, which represent the prototypical combinations of aspect markers and verbs. Further correlation analysis indicated that their difficulties in producing -zhe and -guo were not significantly associated with general language production ability or non-verbal intelligence. All these linguistic features demonstrate that the acquisition of aspect markers in children with ALI is characterized by developmental delay rather than qualitative deviance. This research provides empirical evidence and useful implications for targeted clinical language intervention focusing on aspect markers for Mandarin-speaking children with ALI.