The Test of Variables of Attention (T.O.V.A.; R. A. Leark, T. R. Dupuy, L. M. Greenberg, C. L. Corman, & C. L. Kindeschi, 1996) is a continuous performance test used widely to help diagnose attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in both hearing and deaf people. The T.O.V.A. previously has been normed only on the hearing population. The T.O.V.A. performance of 38 prelingually and severely-to-profoundly deaf young adults and 34 hearing young adults who did not have ADHD was examined in this study. Deaf and hearing participants did not differ on the T.O.V.A. omission variables. However, deaf participants had significantly lower d' scores than hearing participants, indicating reduced perceptual sensitivity to the distinction between target and distractor stimuli. Consistent with the existing literature on attentional reorganization in the deaf population, this result was interpreted as indicating a deafness-related reduction in attention to centrally presented stimuli. Deaf participants also showed 2 to 3 times more commission errors than hearing participants and displayed a higher incidence of anticipatory errors. These results suggest a deafness-related increase in impulsivity at the time of response initiation. Beta score analysis confirmed that deaf participants adopted an overall less conservative (more impulsive) response criterion that contributed to their total elevated commission errors. However, a portion of the commission errors was secondary to their reduced d', not to increased behavioral impulsivity. Separate factor analyses of the standard T.O.V.A. variables revealed highly similar factor structures for deaf and hearing participants, indicating similar construct validity of the T.O.V.A. for both groups. The evidence for increased inattention and impulsivity in a non-ADHD deaf sample are interpreted in the context of an adaptive attentional reorganization due to deafness. Along with the factor analytic results, these considerations suggest that separate T.O.V.A. norms must be developed for the deaf population to avoid overdiagnosis of ADHD in deaf individuals.

English sentences containing the universal quantifiers each, every, and all are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse collegelevel student groups on a multipicture sentence interpretation task. The participant groups (hearing native speakers, deaf students, and second language learners of English) all exhibited fundamental knowledge of universal lexical, semantic, and syntactic properties that contribute to quantifier sentence interpretation. The native speakers outperformed the deaf and second language groups, whose performance was strikingly parallel. Performance patterns are explained in terms of the influences of derivational economy, including the option to restrict in situ indefinite noun phrases to singleton indefinites. The symmetry effect observed in child language studies was also observed among the college-aged participants in this study. It is explained in terms of a pragmatic challenge in managing contextual information that invokes an unexpected singleton indefinite interpretation. The results contribute to the understanding of sentence comprehension under conditions of restricted learner access to target language input and underscore the value of seeking correlates of theory-internal derivational economy in language acquisition and use.

Focus-on-form English teaching methods are designed to facilitate second-language learners' noticing of target language input, where "noticing" is an acquisitional prerequisite for the comprehension, processing, and eventual integration of new grammatical knowledge. While primarily designed for teaching hearing second-language learners, many focus-on-form methods lend themselves to visual presentation. This article reports the results of classroom research on the visually based implementation of focus-on-form methods with deaf college students learning English. Two of 3 groups of deaf students received focus-on-form instruction during a 10-week remedial grammar course; a third control group received grammatical instruction that did not involve focus-on-form methods. The 2 experimental groups exhibited significantly greater improvement in English grammatical knowledge relative to the control group. These results validate the efficacy of visually based focus-on-form English instruction for deaf students of English and set the stage for the continual search for innovative and effective English teaching methodologies.

National Tcctrnicrrl lnstitutt for the DufRodrester Institute of Technology Two experiments were conducted which were designed to assess adult 1 2 karncrs' production and comprehension o! Epglish conditional sentencm 1 he analyses provided lend support to the explanator, power ot markedness theor) in explaining 1 2 acquisition I>iflercnt relative o r d e n 01 difficult) emerged in the production dnd comprehension. respcctivcl,. ol three conditional t! pcs. suggesting that form and function mav be acquired at dillcrent t i m e s in the 1 2 acquisition of syntax Of real.unreal. and past unreal conditions. the real conditions were the easiest t o produce but the most difficult to comprehend r h e v relatire orders of difficulty a n d other developmental differences that emerged between proflcicnc!, kvels are explained in terms of the nature of the distinctike featuresassigned indifferent domains of grammar I ' 1 his research was conducted at the National lechnical Institute for the L k a l a t Rochester Institute o l rechnology in t h e c o u r s of a n agreement w i t h the I1.S l k p a r t m e n t of Education I a m indebted t o E b a b e t h Yeureiter-Seely l o r m a k i n g i t possible l o r students in thc E S O I Program at M o n r o e C o m m u n i t y College t o participate in thishtudy a n d t o Suranne C'I Itaye\\ and B u r b r a A b b o i t . w h o assisted me in gathering the data. I owe especial gratitude t o Ed I.ichtenstein and R o n Kell? lor their assistance and uggestions regarding the statistical design ofthisstudy k i n a l l ? . I would like t o thank Bill Rutherford. Jtw &K-hner. VIMX %mar. J o h n Albertini. and Rusti Berent for their raluable comments 337 338 hng00gP Learning Vol. 35, No. 3 of uamrrkcd items More their marked counterparts.. . , no systematic darts to appJy rryrkdntss concepts t o L2 developmental studies have yet, to my ka0-W.been attempted." Thc following study addresses issues in thir area o f second languagc acquisition research through a n in-th of the acquisition of English conditional sentences by adult speakers of othtr L . n g u a w . Different relative orders of difficulty among thmt types o f conditional sentences will be explained in terms of the acquisition of unmarked items before their marked counterparts. Fwthtrmorc, it will be shown that karners at t w o different stages in the acquisition proass, that is, at two different levels of English language prdrckncy, differ in the manner in which they impose certain principles and arrrteonto conditional structures.With m r d to approaches to the acquisition of syntax. Rutherford (I-.102-3) emphasizes that erroneous conclusions can be reached about the acquisition of syntactic constructions when those constructions are v k w a l in punly structural terms without a consideration of their discourse function: "to study the acquisition of syntactic form divorced from discow# function is a t best to be able to make statements about the m u r r g t acquisition process that m a y be only partially valid." Although English ...

This article explores deaf college students’ knowledge of English wh -question formation in the context of government-binding theory and an associated learnability theory. The parameters of universal grammar (UG) that are relevant to wh -question formation are identified, and predictions are made regarding the learning of the English values of these parameters in accordance with the subset principle, which, it has been proposed, guides the acquisition of UG parameter values that define languages ordered as proper subsets. The results of two learnability tasks revealed that, despite years of exposure to English language input, many deaf learners have not internalized the positive evidence required to set the marked values of the wh -question parameters. This finding provides strong empirical support for the subset principle. Theoretical and educational implications are discussed.