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The comprehension of sentences derived by syntactic movement in Palestinian Arabic speakers with hearing impairment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2013

NAAMA FRIEDMANN  and
MANAR HADDAD-HANNA
NAAMA FRIEDMANN*
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University
MANAR HADDAD-HANNA
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE: Naama Friedmann, Language and Brain Lab, School of Education and Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. E-mail: naamafr@post.tau.ac.il
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Abstract

Sentence and text comprehension is known to be difficult for orally trained individuals with hearing impairment. This study explored the comprehension of several syntactic structures that are especially difficult for these individuals and may lead them to experience considerable comprehension difficulties. Ten structures derived by wh-movement were tested, some of them for the first time in hearing impairment research: five types of relative clauses, three types of wh-questions, and two types of topicalized structures, compared with two types of simple sentences. Experiment 1 tested subject and object relatives using a sentence–picture matching task. Experiment 2 tested subject questions and object questions using a picture selection task. Experiment 3 tested subject and object relatives using comprehension questions. Experiment 4 tested subject and object relatives and topicalized sentences using a reading and paraphrasing task. The participants were 24 orally trained Palestinian Arabic speaking individuals, 21 of them had mild to profound binaural hearing loss, and 3 had monaural hearing loss. The participants with binaural hearing impairment, who were not sufficiently exposed to language input during the first year of life, failed to understand object relatives, object questions, and topicalization in subject–verb and verb–subject orders in both Palestinian Arabic and Standard Arabic. In some tasks, they even had difficulty understanding subject relatives and subject questions. The monaurally hearing impaired performed similarly to the controls on all tasks.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , May 2014 , pp. 473 - 513
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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