Effects of Syntactic Complexity on the Comprehension of Passive Clauses and wh-questions in Children with Developmental Language Disorder and Autism Plus Language Impairment.
Probe which-questions and passives during receptive-language testing; kids with ALI show a unique dip on which-questions that DLD kids do not.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Dai et al. (2025) tested how well kids understand tricky Mandarin sentences.
They compared three groups: kids with developmental language disorder (DLD), kids with autism plus language impairment (ALI), and typically developing peers.
Each child listened to passive sentences and wh-questions, then pointed to the picture that matched.
What they found
Both DLD and ALI groups scored lower than typical peers on passives and wh-questions.
The ALI group had extra trouble with which-questions that ask about objects; DLD kids did not show this pattern.
This means referential which-questions can flag autism-plus-language issues.
How this fits with other research
Su et al. (2019) found Mandarin preschoolers with ASD could track basic SVO word order.
Huilin extends that work by showing the same kids stumble when sentences get complex.
Berkovits et al. (2014) saw English-speaking autistic children struggle with dative alternations; Huilin replicates the syntax-complexity problem in Mandarin wh-questions.
Together the papers map a clear line: simple order is intact, complex structure is not.
Why it matters
When you assess receptive language, mix in which-questions, not just who-questions.
A child who sails through who but fails which may sit in the ALI zone and need distinct goals.
Swap some passive clauses into your probes; if the child points to the wrong picture, you have solid evidence for syntax goals on the ISP.
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Add two which-questions and two passive sentences to your next receptive-language probe and score them by group.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
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.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1007/s10803-016-2912-4