This thesis investigated the development of emotional functioning in 2-to-6-year-old children with and without autism. Whereas autistic children experienced more challenges in the emotional domain,... Show moreThis thesis investigated the development of emotional functioning in 2-to-6-year-old children with and without autism. Whereas autistic children experienced more challenges in the emotional domain, their emotional abilities improved with age, and developed in similar ways as observed in non-autistic children. On the one hand, this thesis showed that autistic children might deal with emotions in a different way, and they might experience various difficulties when communicating emotions with non-autistic people. One the other hand, it is important to note that the difficulties could be bidirectional. As stated by the “double empathy problem”, non-autistic people may experience the same difficulties when communicating with autistic people. This could be a meaningful direction for future research, investigating emotional communication as a two-way interaction rather than focusing only on how people with autism react to people without autism. Furthermore, this thesis showed that autistic children had the potential to learn and to develop in the emotional domain. Again, this points to the importance of investigating how to create an inclusive social environment, which is not only nurturing for children without autism, but can also benefit the development of children with autism and with other special needs. Show less
This thesis attempts to motivate a syntactic analysis of final particles in Chinese. The proposal conforms essentially to the recent hypotheses on the split CP system. It suggests that Chinese... Show moreThis thesis attempts to motivate a syntactic analysis of final particles in Chinese. The proposal conforms essentially to the recent hypotheses on the split CP system. It suggests that Chinese final particles are heads of functional projections in the C-domain. The investigation is implemented by two steps. The first step is examining the semantic function of final particles. It argues that every final particle expresses a semantic core despite its various uses in different contexts. According to its core meaning, each final particle is related to a functional projection in the C-domain. The second step involves the structural mapping of final particles to the sentence structure. Crucial evidence comes from the observation that different final particles can enter a rigidly ordered sequence. On the basis of the linear order, a hierarchy of the corresponding functional projections is established. The languages of interest are Mandarin, Cantonese, and Wenzhou. In this thesis, a detailed description as well as systematic and comparative analysis of the final particle system in the three Chinese languages are provided. This research expands the existing cross-linguistic evidence, showing that Chinese has a rich functional makeup of the C-domain. Show less
