The written syntax of an English deaf child: an exploration in method

Abstract

SummaryThe language of severely deaf children is frequently very deviant in terms of the normal language used by their hearing contemporaries. Some researchers have asserted that the deaf have poor or no linguistic competence, or that they find difficulty in using what they do have to understand and produce sentences. In this paper a purely linguistic method of investigation is described that enables us to examine and describe in detail the structure of the syntactic knowledge of deaf children. The child described in this paper is shown to possess a complex set of syntactic rules, both basic and transformational, which are used to produce totally novel utterances. This deaf child does have linguistic competence of no mean order. However the linguistic rules that she uses appear to have little relationship to those used by the surrounding normally hearing speech community.