A corpus-based comparison of mental state terms production in Mandarin-and English-speaking children with autism
The production of mental state terms in children is often considered an effective indicator of their basic understanding and mastery of their mental states.This study compared the mental state terms produced by Mandarin-and English-speaking children with autism extracted from natural language data in the CHILDES corpus using the text processing software CLAN.The results indicate that Mandarin-and English-speaking children with autism produce mental state terms in similar patterns overall,with a higher proportion of terms related to desire and perception than those related to cognition.However,the extent to which the production of mental state terms is influenced by parental language input differs.Mandarin-speaking children with autism show greater influence from their parents'language input,particularly for more difficult terms related to emotion and cognition,whereas English-speaking children with autism are less influenced by their parents'language input.Despite communication and response difficulties,children with autism can benefit from parental language input to some extent,suggesting that language input is an important factor in helping produce mental state terms.Additionally,collectivist cultural backgrounds may enhance the utilization of language input.
万方数据
维普
