The Acquisition Of The Ba Construction By Deaf Learners

The study investigates the acquisition of the BA construction by deaf learners,and how their ultimate attainment of this construction is influenced by their impoverished language input during early life.Few studies have dedicated to the acquisition of written Chinese by deaf learners.The BA construction is a unique structure and one of the most commonly used structures in Chinese.Therefore,whether deaf learners can understand and use this construction correctly may affect the accuracy in their expressions of written Chinese.The current study examined the acquisition of the basic syntactic property and the properties at syntactic and semantic interface of the BA sentence by deaf learners based on the critical period hypothesis(Lenneberg 1967)and the Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2005).Specifically,this study investigates whether deaf learners acquire its noncanonical word order,the telicity requirement of its predicate,and the meaning of affectedness encoded by the NP following BA(i.e.BA-NP).On the other hand,we also delve into whether deaf learners’ grasp of the syntactic property is divergent from the properties at syntacticsemantic interface.We adopted two experimental methods in order to explore the above issues: a grammaticality judgment task(i.e.GJT)and a production task(i.e.PT).We enrolled48 deaf participants at college level in this study and divided them into four groups based on their first language accessibility during infancy.Those in the critical group(i.e.CG)were not exposed to sign language until they entered deaf schools,and wearing hearing aids devices had limited improvement in their hearing ability.The hearing ability of those in the effectively prompted group(i.e.EPG)was more effectively improved with the help of language training and hearing aids.Some of them had never entered deaf schools,and others spent a period of time in mainstream typical schools but failed to keep up with the pace in class,thereby returning to deaf schools finally.Those in the postlingually deaf group(i.e.PDG)were diagnosed deaf after three years old,usually caused by some kind of disease.Those in the native signer group(i.e.NSG)were born into deaf families and were exposed to sign language from birth.The results showed that deaf groups performed better in the production task than in the comprehension task.To be specific,deaf groups’ acquisition of the basic word order of the BA construction achieved near-native level.The NSG fully mastered the knowledge which is called for by the syntax-semantics domains,while the CG and the EPG had much difficulty in acquiring such knowledge,indicating that the delayed first language input has an effect on second language outcome.PDG,compared with the other deaf groups,had a better grasp of the target knowledge,but did not fully acquire the affectedness property,which suggested that deafness after the age of three hindered the learners from learning some specific properties of written Chinese.Finally,the Interface Hypothesis is partially supported,as the superiority of syntactic knowledge over knowledge at syntactic-semantic interface was observed in three deaf groups’ performance though the NSG did not exhibit such a divergence.