Probing deaf oral linguistic competence with minimal morphosyntactic pairs: The COnVERSA test
Palabras clave:
deaf children, language acquisition, competence assessment, minimal pairs, argument structure, wh-dependencies, pronounsDerechos de autor 2022 CHIMERA: Revista de Corpus de Lenguas Romances y Estudios Lingüísticos
Esta obra está bajo una licencia internacional Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial 4.0.
Resumen
The COnVERSA test (Test di Comprensione delle Opposizioni morfo-sintattiche VERbali attraverso la ScritturA) is a tool for grammatical competence assessment in Italian. It uses informal grammaticality (binary) judgments on written linguistic minimal pairs and it has been developed for testing deaf children, for which no suitable comprehension test was available. Here we discuss the results obtained both from a normally developing hearing children group (NC, 6-10 y.o.) and a deaf children population (DF, 7-16 y.o.). We will focus on children’s minimal morphosyntactic pairs sensitivity in three domains: (i) argument structure, (ii) question formation, and (iii) pronominal usage. We will then compare these results with those obtained on agreement-based dependencies (Chesi et al., 2023). Our findings support a complexity metric, based on two structural dimensions (functional height and intervention), which is used to guide a dynamic administration modality, in the end significantly reducing the assessment time without decreasing the discriminative power of the test. Our data confirm the poor discriminative ability of DF (especially those without a cochlear implant) for configurations targeting the highest functional domains and involving intervention.
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