1. Introduction

Psychological state words are crucial for children's communication and cognitive development, as their use reflects their understanding of psychological states. The production of psychological state words in children is related to pragmatic ability, vocabulary level, and cultural background. The cultural differences between the East and the West affect the production of psychological state words in children. Eastern culture places more emphasis on collective moral rules, while Western culture emphasizes individual psychological states. Children with autism have difficulty understanding their own and others' psychological states due to social barriers and theoretical deficiencies, which can affect their language input and utilization. Existing research has focused more on innate factors such as psychological theory deficits and social disorders in children with autism, with less research on their output and the impact of acquired factors such as native language background and language input. The naturally generated corpus more accurately reflects the language proficiency of children with autism. This article will compare the production patterns of psychological state words in Chinese and English children with autism, and explore the factors that lead to the similarities and differences. The production of cognitive state words in children with typical development of different mother tongues is later than in other categories, and whether it is applicable to children with autism has not been confirmed. It is worth exploring whether the production of psychological state words in children with autism from different mother tongues is influenced by parental language input.

2. Literature review

The production of psychological state words in children with autism is closely related to their psychological theory skills, which affects the interpretation of social intentions and behavior prediction. Research shows that English or Hebrew autistic children use fewer psychological state words, but there is no significant difference between Chinese autistic children and the control group. There are differences in the expression of psychological state words between Chinese and English, with Chinese expressions being relatively simple. There is a significant difference in the production of psychological state words in parental language input between Chinese and English children, which may be influenced by cultural differences. The cross linguistic comparative study on the production of psychological state words in children with autism is not sufficient and further exploration is needed.

3. Research questions and methods

This chapter explores a comparative study of the production of psychological state words in Chinese and English children with autism, aiming to fill the gap in cross linguistic research and examine the influence of parental language input. The research questions include: 1) Differences in the production of psychological state words in Chinese and English children with autism; 2) Differences in psychological state words in parental language input; 3) Differences in the impact of parental language input on children's output. The study used the CHILDES corpus to select natural language materials from Chinese and English children with autism, ensuring that there were no significant differences in the class/form symbol ratio and vocabulary density between the two groups of children. During the recording process, parents guided their children to play and discuss, and the corpus was transcribed and analyzed using CLAN software. The study used the Tager Flusberg classification to categorize psychological state words into four types: emotion, desire, cognition, and perception. The total output of Chinese children was 2021, while that of English children was 1149.

4. Research results

This study used RStudio's lme4 package to fit a linear mixed model to analyze the proportion of psychological state word production in Chinese English children with autism. The results showed that there was no significant difference in the proportion of psychological state words produced between the two groups of children, but there were significant differences in the proportion of different categories of psychological state words. Chinese children with autism tend to produce desire state words, while English children with autism tend to produce more perceptual and emotional state words. In the language input of parents, Chinese parents have a higher proportion of desire state words, while English parents have a higher proportion of perception state words. Spearman correlation analysis shows that there is a significant positive correlation between the production of psychological state words and parental language input in Chinese children with autism, while there is no significant correlation in English children with autism.

5. Comprehensive discussion

We explored the similarities and differences in the production of psychological state words in Chinese and English children with autism, and found that the two groups of children have a universal cross linguistic pattern in the production of psychological state words, but there are differences in the production of specific categories of psychological state words. The proportion of emotional state words produced by Chinese children with autism is lower than that of cognitive state words, while the proportion of cognitive state words produced by English children with autism is comparable to that of emotional state words. This may be related to emotional deficits in children with autism. In terms of parental language input, there are differences in the use of psychological state words between Chinese and English parents. Chinese parents tend to use desire state words, while English parents tend to use perception state words. This difference reflects the differences in Eastern and Western cultures and ways of thinking. The language input of parents of Chinese autistic children has a significant impact on their psychological state word production, while English autistic children exhibit a similar cross linguistic consistent production pattern as Chinese autistic children. This indicates that the production of psychological state words in children with autism may be influenced by both innate and environmental factors.

6. Conclusion

The use of psychological state words in Chinese and English autistic children and their parents was analyzed using the CHILDES corpus and CLAN software. The results showed that although there were significant differences in parental language input, children with autism in both languages had similar patterns of producing psychological state words, mainly manifested in the frequency of using desire and perception state words being much higher than cognitive state words. The production of emotional and cognitive state words in Chinese autistic children is related to parental input, which may be difficult for children to independently master due to the difficulty of these words. Research has shown that children with autism from different native language backgrounds have commonalities in the production of psychological state words, but are influenced to varying degrees by parental language input. Children with autism are able to utilize language input, indicating that innate factors and language input may jointly affect the production of psychological state words. The study provides a new perspective for the assessment and intervention of children with autism, but due to the small sample size, future research needs to expand the sample size to enhance the generalizability of the results.