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CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 

1.1  Research background 
Specific  language  impairment  (SLI)  refers  to  a  significant  impairment  in  spoken language ability when there  are no obvious accompanying conditions such as mental retardation,  neurological  or  hearing  impairment  (Bishop  1992).  Children  with  SLI show  age-appropriate  scores  on  nonverbal  tests  of  intelligence  (Bishop  1992). According to the statistics abroad (Tomblin et al. 1997), the prevalence rate of SLI is about  7.4%  and  about  half  of  these  children  with  SLI  have  difficulties  in  learning, especially in reading, after admission to school (Mc Arthur et al. 2000). And many of the people exhibiting SLI as children continue to have relatively weak language skills as  adults  (Leonard  2014).  Since  China  has  a  large  population,  it  is  reasonable to  say that  there  are  a  relative  large  number  of  children  who  suffer  from  SLI  in  China. Therefore, it is not only necessary but also meaningful to study Chinese SLI.  According  to  Leonard  et  al.  (2000),  despite  individual  differences,  a  common profile shown by children with SLI is a mild to moderate deficit in different aspects of language,  such  as  word  learning,  lexical  and  phonological  representations,  argument structure and morphosyntax like syntactic structure and grammatical morphology, etc. (Leonard  2014).  With  regard  to  syntax,  the  level  of  SLI  children’s  performance  is below  that  of  younger  controls  in  the  use  of  complicated  structures  that  involve syntactic  movement  operations  such  as  wh-object  questions,  relative  clauses,  or structures  that  involve  binding  or  control  relations  (Leonard  2014).  Since  different Chinese ditransitive constructions also have complex structural and semantic relations, we would like to know whether SLI children have difficulty in the production of such structures. 
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1.2  Aims and research questions  
This  study  aims  to  investigate syntactic  priming  in  Chinese  children  with  a  focus  on Mandarin-speaking Specific Language Impairment (SLI) children’s production of the ditransitive  construction.  By  studying  both  the  spontaneous  and  primed  productions, we would like to address the following three questions: 1.  How  are  different  types  of  ditransitive  constructions  distributed  in  the spontaneous production of Mandarin-speaking children with and without SLI? 2.  Does  syntactic  priming  occur  in  the  primed  production  of  children &本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。