Hearing Impaired Adolescents' Comprehension of Anaphoric Relationships Within Conjoined Sentences

Abstract

Thirty-two hearing impaired adolescents were administered a test instrument assessing comprehension of three anaphoric forms within conjoined sentences: repeated noun, personal pronouns, and null form. The null form was presented in two semantic environments. One environment allowed use of the object-subject deletion rule, a deviant rule found in the language of some hearing impaired students. In this environment, use of the deviant rule produced a conceptually acceptable event. Use of the deviant rule in the second environment, however, produced a conceptually unacceptable event. The null form anaphora in the semantically acceptable environment was significandy more difficult than the other anaphora. Implications for teaching language and development of reading materials for hearing impaired students are discussed.

Processing of Cohesive Ties by EFL Arab College Students

“…Nunan (1983) concluded that L1 secondary school students found it more difficult to resolve semantic relationships beyond the sentence than those within the sentence. Stoefen-Fisher (1988) found that the null form anaphora (an anaphor with no explicit antecedent) in a semantically acceptable environment was significantly more difficult than other anaphora. The results of a study by Parish and Perkins (1984) help to explain the findings of the present study Parish and Perkins reported that the proficiency level of ESL college students was a significant factor in comprehending anaphoric reference.…”

Teaching Reading to Children Who Are Deaf: Do the Conclusions of the National Reading Panel Apply?

“…The authors concluded that efforts to control readability through manipulation of syntax and vocabulary may result in texts that are actually more difficult for deaf students to comprehend because of lack of text coherence. Stoefen-Fisher (1987 sought to identify the difficulty of specific English structures that should be considered when creating linguistically controlled reading materials and television captions. She administered a test with target linguistic structures embedded in short paragraphs to 90 deaf students, ages 10-18, classified as high and low scorers on a test of syntactic abilities.…”