Metalinguistic awareness in young deaf children: A preliminary study

Abstract

This study explores the metalinguistic abilities of prelingually deaf children aged 4-7, who are users of Signed English, with regard to their explicit segmentation of Signed English sentences into words. Subjects exhibited varying metalinguistic abilities that generally increased with age and that were similar to the developmental pattern found in hearing populations. Based upon performance with respect to four factors (i.e., explicit segmentation, omissions of function words, content words, and inflectional morphemes), subjects were grouped into four classes. In Class 1, sentences or groups of words were not segmented. In Class 2, major constituents of the sentences were segmented. In Class 3, major constituents and some function words were segmented. In Class 4, the entire sentence was segmented. Patterns of omissions found throughout the classes for function words and inflectional morphemes are discussed. Also addressed are implicit segmentation skills found to develop prior to the development of explicit abilities.

Longitudinal effects of manual English instruction on deaf children’s morphological skills

“…In part, this is due to differences in ages or training of subjects (Cooper, 1967;Quigley & King, 1980). But it also results from limitations in either the range of grammatical features these studies examined or their procedures for eliciting responses (Crandall, 1978;Zorfass, 1981), which may have required only judgments of correctness (Raffin et al, 1978). However, the individual elements of deaf subjects' ICP responses (e.g., the noun plurals of the 3rd Person Present Indicative contrasts) do seem to indicate greater facility with -ing than -ed and earlier control of plural -s than indicative -s inflections.…”

“…But they did discover a positive relationship between performance and length of time in an MCE program which the Crandall (1978) study did not examine with the younger deaf subjects. Zorfass (1981) evaluated metalinguistic abilities of 4-to 7-year-olds with a manipulative imitation task. The analyses that focused on omission of MCE function words and inflectional endings showed a significant positive correlation of age with performance.…”

Word awareness in hearing-impaired children

“…Nevertheless, there has been little metalinguistic research with hearing-impaired children, and the principal focus of existing studies has been on phonological segmentation skills. This research has revealed hearing-impaired children's ability to segment their fingerspelled lexicons (Hirsh-Pasek, 1987), as well as age-related increases in the segmentation of Signed English sentences into words (Zorfass, 1981). Thus, we know that young hearingimpaired children are aware of words as units of language, at the very least.…”