The digital coloring page task for examining comprehension of passives in Mandarin-speaking children with DLD and autistic children

Abstract

Prior cross-linguistic investigations have reported that children diagnosed with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often struggle with long passive constructions, whereas results concerning children on the autism spectrum remain less conclusive. This study assessed passive sentence comprehension through a digital coloring task across four groups: children with DLD, children on the autism spectrum without language deficits (ALN), those with co-occurring language impairments (ALI), and age-matched typically developing controls (TD). Accuracy analyses confirmed clear group differences and a robust short-over-long passive advantage. Children with DLD and ALI exhibited significant syntactic and semantic difficulties in passives. Children in the ALN group achieved comprehension scores that were on par with their TD peers. Thematic role reversals were the most common errors, though observer errors occurred disproportionately in DLD and ALI. At the individual level, above-chance performance only on long passives was observed in a subset of children with ALI but not in DLD. The advantage for short over long passives can be accounted for by the Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis (EFUH), which predicts that intervention effects in long passives disrupt children’s ability to establish the required dependencies. Both children with DLD and those with ALI showed syntactic and semantic vulnerabilities, but only the latter group benefited from the presence of an overt post-bei agent. These findings demonstrate that the EFUH provides a principled account of the asymmetry between long and short passives in both DLD and ALI, while the observed divergences between these two groups offer clinically relevant insights for differential diagnosis and the design of tailored intervention approaches.