The development of discourse referencing in Cantonese of deaf/hard-of-hearing children.
This paper investigates the development of discourse referencing in spoken Cantonese of fifteen deaf/hard-of-hearing children studying in a sign bilingual and co-enrollment education programme in a mainstream setting in Hong Kong. A comparison of their elicited narratives with those of the hearing children and adults shows that, despite a delay in acquiring the grammatical markings for (in)definiteness in Cantonese, these d/hh children show sensitivity towards the referential properties of different types of nominal expressions and their corresponding mappings with discourse functions. Specifically, they produced more bare nouns across all discourse contexts but fewer existential constructions, pronouns, demonstratives, and classifier-related constructions. Their choice of nominal expressions and the observed errors show striking similarities to the productions by the younger hearing children in this study, suggesting that the d/hh children's route of development of discourse referencing is likely to be similar to that of hearing children despite a slower rate of development.
Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages,The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Felix
F
Sze
Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages,The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Gladys
G
Tang
Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages,The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Tammy
T
Lau
Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages,The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Emily
E
Lam
Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages,The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Chris
C
Yiu
D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003638:Deafness; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D012813:Sign Language