Sentence Repetition in Deaf Children with Specific Language Impairment in British Sign Language

Abstract

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link AbstractChildren with specific language impairment (SLI) perform poorly on sentence repetition tasks across different spoken languages. Up to this point, sentence repetition has not been investigated in children who have SLI in a signed language. Users of a natural sign language encode different sentence meanings through their choice of signs and by altering the sequence and inflections of these signs. The visual modality influences how grammatical morphology and syntax are instantiated. The grammatical changes are through movement and configuration changes of the hands and face. How would language impairment impact on the acquisition of these types of linguistic devices in child signers? We investigated sentence repetition skills in a group of eleven deaf children who display SLI in British Sign Language (BSL) and eleven deaf controls with no language impairment who were matched for age and years of BSL exposure. The SLI group was significantly less accurate on an overall accuracy score, and they repeated lexical items, overall sentence meaning, sign order, facial expressions and verb morphological structures significantly less accurately than controls. This pattern of language deficits is consistent with the characterization of SLI in spoken languages even though expression is in a different modality. We conclude that explanations of SLI, and of poor sentence repetition by children with this disorder, must be able to account for both the spoken and signed modalities.3

The Development of Sensitivity to Grammatical Violations in American Sign Language: Native Versus Nonnative Signers

“…As predicted, chronological age influenced performance on the syntactic task for both native and nonnative signers (see Tables and Figures ). This result for ASL is consistent with findings from other signed languages—Sign Language of the Netherlands (Hermans et al., ) and BSL (Marshall et al., )—showing syntactic development with age, and is compatible with research on spoken languages (Sutter & Johnson, ).…”

“…Siegel and Ryan (1988), for example, found that children with learning disabilities performed significantly more poorly than typically developing children on grammatical error correction tasks. The current results add to the growing literature of identifying language difficulties in children using signed language: BSL (Herman, Rowley, Mason, & Morgan, 2014;Marshall et al, 2014;Mason et al, 2010;Morgan, Herman, & Woll, 2007;Woll & Morgan, 2012) and ASL Quinto-Pozos et al, 2013, Quinto-Pozos, Forber-Pratt, & Singleton, 2011. These findings suggest that reliable assessment tools may need to be developed for specific language backgrounds, such that nonnative signers' scores should be compared to nonnative norms and native signers' scores should be compared to native norms (Herman, Holmes, & Woll, 2001;Mann & Marshall, 2012).…”

“…Research exploring the development of sign language syntax during school ages has been limited compared to the retrospective studies just described. In a recent study on British Sign Language (BSL), school-age deaf children with language impairment were compared with a control group of typically developing deaf children on different types of BSL sentences using a repetition task (Marshall et al, 2014). The control group (signing deaf children without language impairment) included 11 deaf students aged 6;10 to 13;0.…”

Deficits in narrative abilities in child British Sign Language users with specific language impairment

“…The results of the current study extend previous descriptions of deaf children with sign language impairments in their nonsense sign repetition (Woll and Morgan ), sentence repetition (Marshall et al . under review) and semantic fluency (Marshall et al .…”

Morphosyntactic abilities of toddlers with hearing impairment and normal hearing: evidence from a sentence‐repetition task

“…They were shown to be effective in identifying deaf, school‐age children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) when tested in sign modality (Marshall et al . ). The SRep task is complex: it involves auditory perception of the stimuli and reproduction of them.…”