Inflectional morphological awareness of Turkish deaf students

This study attempted to determine how Turkish deaf students acquired inflectional morphological awareness and to investigate the possible effects on the development of morphological awareness. 100 hearing and 100 deaf participants attending elementary schools from grades 4 to 8 were tested via an online grammaticality judgment task on SuperLab 4.0 software. It was developed to evaluate participants’ ability to use inflectional morphology knowledge. The findings showed that the inflectional morphological awareness of deaf students doesn’t increase with grade. Generally, Turkish morphology awareness skills of hearing students from 4th to 8th grades were significantly better than deaf counterparts. We proposed that deaf students’ difficulties in understanding the morpho-syntactic relationships in Turkish may be due to negative transfer of morpho-syntactic constraints of Turkish Sign Language (TİD).