Argument omissions by deaf students in three languages and three modalities

Abstract

While it is common for deaf children to be bilingual in a spoken and signed language, studies often attribute any delays in language acquisition to language deprivation, rather than as a result of cross-linguistic interaction. This study compares the production of simple sentences in three languages (Palestinian Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and Israeli Sign Language [ISL]) and three language modalities (spoken, written, and signed) by deaf and hearing students in an Arabic-speaking community. Thirty-eight school-age Palestinian Arabic–speaking students participated in a sentence elicitation task in which they retold the events portrayed in video clips. Hearing students ( n = 19) produced the sentences in spoken Palestinian Arabic and in written Modern Standard Arabic. Deaf students ( n = 19) produced the sentences in these two language varieties and additionally in ISL. Omissions of arguments and verbs were compared across the two groups and three languages. Results showed that deaf students omitted more arguments and verbs compared with their hearing peers who scored at close to ceiling. Deaf students produced more omissions for direct objects and more omissions in ISL. The findings can be interpreted in two possible ways: atypical effects resulting from inconsistent language input and cross-linguistic transfer known to arise in multilingual children.

Prepositional Phrases in Deaf and Hearing Students’ Narratives: A Functional Perspective

“…The less various positions and the less complex patterns of prepositional phrases in deaf students' narratives of the present study are suspected to correlate with the limited lexical resources in their cognition. This is possibly due to their lack of access to the verbal language provided by the environment during childhood (Hall et al, 2019;Henner et al, 2016;Higgins & Lieberman, 2016;Stamp et al, 2021). However, the current study still believes that by nature all individuals without intellectual disability including deaf writers have the circumstances of events stored in their cognition but in implicit ways.…”

“…Previous studies have proved that the limited access of deaf children to verbal or sign language especially during their critical period can contribute to a lower level of literacy. This case is especially found in deaf individuals from hearing families where there is a lack of linguistic input received from the parents (Hall, 2017;Stamp et al, 2021). In the present study, all the deaf participants came from a hearing family.…”

“…In syntax, their clauses can lack either a subject or verb as claimed by Hamidah (2013) in her preliminary examination while their language has been also characterized by problems in employing subordinate clauses (Bowers et al, 2018;Terugi & Gutierrez-Caceres, 2015). Further, their verbs especially the transitive ones have been found to lack objects (Stamp et al, 2021). The 'irregular' adoption of language produced by students with deafness has also been confirmed in their unique vocabulary, for example, the words 'transferred' from their sign language (Andrade et al, 2010).…”