An Exploratory Investigation of the Comprehension of English Through Sign English (Siglish) and Seeing Essential English (SEE 1 )

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to explore comprehension levels of deaf children for English stories via Seeing Essential English (SEE 1 ) and Sign English (Siglish). Eleven children using SEE 1 and 11 children using Siglish were utilized as the experimental subjects. Each child received visually the first three narrative passages and accompanying questions in manual form from the Listening Comprehension subtest of the Durrell Analysis of Reading Difficulty. Correct responses were then tabulated. Although the data indicated that the deaf children trained in SEE 1 were generally superior to those trained in Siglish regarding comprehension of these English narratives, generalizations appeared tenuous. Thus, an hypothesis that a manual communication system representative of English morphology, vocabulary, and syntax provides more efficient comprehension of English than signing systems not employing a similar English base deserves further investigation.