Comprensión de la sintaxis española por lectores sordos chilenos

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore how Chilean, deaf readers comprehend sentences that contain different syntactic structures in Spanish. Each of the subjects, students and adults, individually completed a test of syntactic comprehension that required them to read a series of printed sentences and act them out with dolls and small objects according to their interpretation of each text. Results showed that, although the adults were more successful in interpreting the sentences than the students, overall, the deaf subjects demonstrated a very defficient level of comprehension of any sentence that deviated from a basic SVO word order consisting of explicit, noun-verb-noun elements. Overextension of the mimimal distance principle and imposition of SVO word order predominated as reading strategies employed by deaf subjects of both age groups.