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The written syntax of an English deaf child: an exploration in method
Author(s) -
IVIMEY GEOFFREY P.
Publication year - 1976
Publication title -
international journal of language and communication disorders
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.101
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1460-6984
pISSN - 1368-2822
DOI - 10.3109/13682827609011297
Subject(s) - linguistics , psychology , linguistic competence , syntax , competence (human resources) , sociolinguistics of sign languages , deaf community , set (abstract data type) , language interpretation , sign language , computer science , social psychology , philosophy , programming language
Summary The 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.