This paper investigates the comprehension of long and short passives in 15 Mandarin preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4;2–5;11 years), 15 Typically Developing Age-matched (TDA) (aged 4;3–5;8 years) children, and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) (aged 3;2–4;3 years) children by using the picture-sentence matching task. The results reveal that children with DLD encounter more difficulty comprehending long passives compared with short passive, that they perform worse on the comprehension task than TDA children and TDY children, and that this population is more likely to commit thematic role reversal errors and point to pictures with the incorrect agent (patient) than typically developing children. Given that Mandarin passives are Topic Structures, we maintain that children with DLD are insensitive to the edge feature of the moved element in long passives, leading to Relativized Minimality effect and causing the asymmetry between the comprehension of long and short passives. These results align well with the Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis. Errors found in the children with DLD in the comprehension task point toward impaired syntactic knowledge and the lexical semantic deficit.

本文调查了 15 名患有发展性语言障碍 (DLD)（4;2–5;11 岁）和 15 名典型发育年龄匹配 (TDA)（4;3–5 岁）的普通话学龄前儿童对长被动语态和短被动语态的理解能力。 ;8 岁）儿童和 15 名典型发育较年轻（TDY）（3;2-4;3 岁）儿童，通过使用图片-句子匹配任务。结果表明，与短被动语态相比，DLD 儿童在理解长被动语态时遇到更多困难，他们在理解任务上的表现比 TDA 儿童和 TDY 儿童差，并且该人群更容易犯主题角色反转错误并指向图片与正常发育的儿童相比，与不正确的代理人（患者）合作。鉴于普通话被动语态是话题结构，我们认为DLD儿童对长被动语态中移动元素的边缘特征不敏感，导致相对极小效应，造成长短被动语态理解的不对称。这些结果与边缘特征规格不足假设非常吻合。患有 DLD 的儿童在理解任务中发现的错误表明句法知识受损和词汇语义缺陷。