Discourse production of mandarin-speaking children with high-functioning autism: The effect of mental and action verbs' semantic-pragmatic features

•Children with HFA committed few syntactic errors in using mental verbs.•Children with HFA produced few pragmatic clauses in using mental verbs.•Children with HFA were able to acquire the syntactic frames of mental verbs.•Children with HFA had semantic-pragmatic impairment in mental verbs.

The present study investigated the syntactic and pragmatic performance of children with high-functioning autism (HFA) during a discourse production task with mental verbs. Children with HFA and typically developing (TD) children were matched by chronological age, verbal IQ (VIQ) and full-scale IQ (FIQ). We found that children with HFA tended to select a nominal object given a mental verb with either a nominal or clausal object. They committed few syntactic errors but generated syntactic stereotypes with mental verbs. However, this behavior was not observed with action verbs. Thus, children with HFA were specifically impaired in the argument structures of mental verbs. In pragmatic performance, children with HFA produced significantly fewer clauses or sentences with lower syntactic complexity for mental verbs than TD controls. This result might be due to the semantic-pragmatic impairment of children with HFA in the use of mental verbs. This study concludes that children with HFA were able to acquire the syntactic frames of mental verbs but were nevertheless impaired in the acquisition of pragmatic information inherent in those verbs.