The production of passives in Mandarin children with and without developmental language disorder

We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2–5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3–5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2–4;3). This particular task resulted in a preference for long passives over short passives by Mandarin-speaking children. However, children with DLD exhibited lower proficiency in the production of passives than TDA and TDY children. Moreover, this group was prone to produce avoidance strategies as alternatives to constructing long passives, such as passives without the intervention effect (exemplified by long passives with an implicit subject), non-target passives (such as short passives without a marker and long passives with a resumptive pronoun or noun), and a range of other responses (including active constructions, irrelevant responses, and cases of non-production). In line with the Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis, challenges encountered by children with DLD in producing long passives can be attributed to the Relativized Minimality effect. The observed reliance on avoidance strategies in the passive production task reflected their compromised syntactic knowledge. We conclude that the central syntactic deficit in children with DLD appears to lie in structure building.