Comprehension of Ditransitive Constructions in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Developmental Language Disorder and Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Plus Language Impairment.
DLD kids learning Mandarin stumble mainly on who-did-what-to-whom, while ALI kids trip over many sentence parts at once.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Qiu et al. (2025) tested how well Mandarin-speaking kids understand ditransitive sentences. These are short sentences with two objects, like "Mom gives the boy a cookie."
They compared three groups: children with developmental language disorder (DLD), children with autism plus language impairment (ALI), and typically developing peers. Each child listened to short sentences and pointed to the matching picture.
What they found
Both the DLD and ALI groups scored lower than the control group. The DLD group mostly mixed up who gave what. The ALI group made more mixed-up errors across the board.
In plain words, DLD kids showed a picky problem with mapping roles. ALI kids showed a wider language crack that went beyond just swapping giver and gift.
How this fits with other research
Rong (2024) also saw lower receptive scores in Mandarin-speaking autistic kids, but on spatial words like "this/that." Both studies used similar picture-point tasks, so the deficit pattern looks real across grammar bits.
Saban-Bezalel et al. (2019) found vocabulary, not executive function, drove idiom comprehension in ASD. Weizhe’s ALI group had broader trouble, hinting that when autism plus language impairment is present, the problem spills past vocabulary into sentence frames.
Cardillo et al. (2021) showed theory of mind (ToM) mediates pragmatic language in ASD. Weizhe did not test ToM, but the ALI group’s wide errors could link to the same social-cognitive gap Ramona flagged.
Why it matters
If you assess Mandarin-speaking kids, expect role-reversal errors in pure DLD and messier, wider gaps in ALI. Drill thematic-role mapping for DLD, but add broader sentence work and possibly ToM cues for ALI. This sharper picture helps you pick targets and explain profiles to parents in clear, everyday words.
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Add a quick picture-point task with ditransitive sentences to your Mandarin intake; note if errors are mostly role swaps or random mixes to guide therapy focus.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study examined and compared the comprehension of Mandarin ditransitive constructions in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with autism spectrum disorder plus language impairment (ALI). Eighteen children with DLD, 17 children with ALI, and 27 age-matched typically developing (TDA) children, participated in a sentence-picture matching task on four patterns of Mandarin ditransitive constructions. Both children with DLD and children with ALI received significantly lower accuracy than TDA children in general and their most common errors were thematic role reversals. However, while children with ALI evinced a generalized deficit in all four patterns, only the comprehension of S1 (Subj. + Vgei + IO + DO) and S3 (Subj. + gei + IO + V + DO) was affected in children with DLD, with that of S2 (Subj. + V + DO + gei + IO) and S4 (Subj. + V + IO + DO) preserved in this population. Additionally, thematic role reversal errors were more dominant in children with DLD than in children with ALI who also committed a relatively higher proportion of Wrong Theme and No Recipient errors. It is concluded that the primary deficit of children with DLD lies in representing dependent relationships between the arguments and the verb as involved in thematic role assignment, but this is less critical in children with ALI, with their performance on the comprehension task possibly also related to other factors associated with the condition. To enhance the development of ditransitive constructions, intervention efforts for children with DLD and children with ALI could focus on strengthening the connection between each argument and its thematic role.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1007/s10803-024-06271-z