Reference tracking strategies of deaf adult signers in Turkish Sign Language

Abstract

We investigated the reference tracking strategies among deaf adults with signing deaf parents (DoD) and adult deaf signers with non-signing hearing parents or caregivers (DoH) who had late exposure to Turkish Sign Language (TİD). Consistent with the theories of saliency and referential accessibility, regardless of their acquisition groups or parental hearing status, signers mainly used nominals and extension classifiers for introducing referents. To maintain a referent from the previous clause, the signers used zero anaphora (e.g., constructed action, agreement and plain verbs). For topic shifts or re-introduced contexts, nominals and pronouns were chiefly favored although we observed very little pronominal use. As for the effect of native acquisition from deaf caregivers, we only report limited over-redundancy for DoH signers who used zero anaphora less compared to DoD especially for introduced and maintained contexts. We conclude that DoH signers are still able to achieve native-like competency in terms of reference tracking in simple narratives but DoD signers utilize the spatial affordances of the visual-spatial modality better than DoH signers only to a certain extent.