The Grammar Impairment of Mandarin Chinese SLI Children: Evidence from Topic-comment Structures

Acquisition of topic structure was studied in 12 Mandarin Chinesespeaking SLI children aged from 3,116,1 and in two other groups of children with normal language development (TDA TDY). The study aimed to find out whether the Chinese SLI children encounter difficulties when comprehending and producing topic structures, and to locate the sources of the deficits if there are. Comprehension and Production was assessed by using one binary sentencepicture matching tasks, one elicitation production task. The findings were that while the Chinesespeaking SLI children comprehend subject topic structures around the age of 40, they are still at chance level in object topic structures at that age. The comprehension impairment is interpreted in the approach of Relativized Minimality as underspecification of the feature set of the moved elements. The SLI children avoid producing the target structure, instead utilizing derivationally less complex SVO sentences. The deficit in production can be accounted for by the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis.