Pronominalization in the language of deaf students

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Special Education

Background:

• Pronoun acquisition is a complex aspect of language development.
• Understanding how deaf individuals acquire pronouns is crucial for educational interventions.
• Previous research has explored pronoun acquisition in various populations, but specific comparisons between deaf and hearing children's mastery of different pronoun types are less common.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the acquisition of different pronoun types (subject, object, possessive adjectives, possessive pronouns, reflexives, relative pronouns) in deaf and hearing students.
• To investigate whether pronoun acquisition follows a categorical or individual item-by-item learning process.
• To identify specific challenges in pronoun usage for deaf learners.

Main Methods:

• A total of 480 deaf students (ages 10-18) and 60 hearing children (ages 8-10) participated.
• Participants completed stimulus sentences by selecting the correct pronoun from a given list.
• Performance was analyzed based on pronoun type and participant group.

Main Results:

• Subject and object case pronouns were acquired more easily than possessive adjectives.
• Possessive pronouns and reflexives presented greater difficulty than possessive adjectives.
• Relative pronouns were the most challenging for both deaf and hearing students.
• Pronoun mastery appeared to be on an individual, pronoun-by-pronoun basis, rather than by broader linguistic categories.

Conclusions:

• Pronoun acquisition is not uniform across categories for either deaf or hearing children.
• The findings suggest a need for individualized instruction in pronoun usage, particularly for relative pronouns.
• Educational strategies should acknowledge the item-specific nature of pronoun learning in deaf students.