Download Written Language Abilities in Deaf Italians

Written Language Abilities in Deaf Italians
Daniela Fabbretti
Universita degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"
Virginia Volterra
Istijtuto di Psicologia del C.N.R.
Clotilde Pontecorvo
Universita degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"
Written texts produced by 10 Italian deaf native signers in
four different writing tasks were analyzed. Data analysis focused on linguistic and orthographic nonstandard forms.
The written production of deaf subjects with deaf parents
(DD) was compared to the written production in two control
groups: a group of 10 hearing subjects with deaf parents
(HD) and a group of 10 subjects who have had no contact
with deaf people or sign language (HH). The results duplicate findings from previous studies. Deaf subjects display a
pattern of selective difficulty with Italian grammatical morphology, especially with free-standing function words. The
four different writing tasks used in the present study yield
results indicating that text type does influence our assessment of deaf writing abilities. A comparison of the texts written by deaf native signers with those of two hearing groups
confirms the view that difficulties in the acquisition of written Italian are best explained by deafness itself, not by the
influence of a previously acquired Sign Language, and that
the specific difficulties with grammatical morphology displayed by our deaf subjects cannot be attributed solely to
their limited experience with written Italian.
A brief review of the literature reveals that writing abilities in the deaf is a neglected research topic. Furthermore, most of the existing research has been conducted
in English-speaking countries (Anderson, 1993; Gregory, 1995; Kelly, 1987; Maxwell & Falick, 1992;
Yoshinaga-Itano & Downey, 1992; for a review of the
early studies on the English-language see Quigley &
Partial support was provided by an NIDCD grant (NIDCD-R01-19639)
and by p. f. CNR-Beni Culturali A.S.T.E.R.L.I.GS. Correspondence
should be sent to Virginia Volterra, Istituto di Psicologia del C.N.R., Reparto di Neuropsicologia del Linguaggio e Sorditi, Via Nomentana 56,
00161, Roma.
© 1998 Oxford University Press
Paul, 1984, and Paul & Quigley, 1994), thereby limiting
the generalizability of these results. The main conclusions yielded by this literature to date can be summarized as follows:
• Deaf subjects produce shorter sentences and simpler syntactical structures than their hearing counterparts.
• They display poor vocabulary and lexical rigidity.
• They encounter problems with relative, subordinate, and pronominal clauses.
• Although they show difficulties in various aspects
of written language (lexical, morphological, syntactic,
and pragmatic), their problems are most striking in the
area of grammatical morphology, including omissions,
substitutions, and additions of various morphemes.
The primary purpose of this article is to investigate
writing deficits in deaf speakers of Italian, a language
with a rich and complex grammatical morphology that
may yield information about specific morphological
patterns that would be difficult to detect in English (for
more informations on acquisition of English morphology by deaf people see Cooper, 1967; Gaustad, 1986).
Until 10 years ago, no systematic research had been
carried out on the language skills of the deaf in written
and spoken Italian, although educators of deaf Italians
have noted many writing difficulties in their students.
Over the last 10 years a series of systematic studies has
tried to answer the following questions (for a review,
see Caselli & Volterra, 1993): (1) Do deaf children use
232
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 3:3 Summer 1998
Table 1 Noun pluralization and articles in Italian
Singular
Plural
cavallo (horse)
cavalli (horses)
bambola (doll)
bambole (dolls)
fiore (flower)
fiori (flowers)
torre (tower)
torri (towers)
il cavallo (the horse)
il fucile (the rifle)
la bambola (the doll)
la notte (the night)
i cavalli (the horses)
i fucili (the rifles)
le bambole (the dolls)
le notti (the nights)
lo zaino (the backpack)
lo stivale (the boot)
gli zaini (the backpacks)
gli stivali (the boots)
Noun pluralization in Italian
Major patterns
Masculine singular
with -o ending [pi. -i]
Feminine singular
with -a ending [pi. -e]
Minor patterns
Masculine singular
with -e ending [pi. -(]
Feminine singular
with -e ending [pi. -i]
Italian articles
Masculine singular: i/[pl. i]
Feminine singular: la [pi. le]
Minor masculine patterns
Masculine singular: lo [pi. gli]
different strategies in the acquisition of Italian ? (2) Do
they attain native levels of competence at least in the
written form of a vocal language? (3) Is it possible to
detect in the written Italian used by deaf people specific linguistic difficulties in particular aspects of the
language? We will begin with a brief summary of findings from previous studies, which have analyzed performance on specific linguistic tasks as well as spontaneous written production by deaf Italian children,
adolescents, and adults. Then we will present more recent data from a new study focused on writing abilities
in deaf adult native signers.
In a first study, 25 severe and profound1 deaf children between the ages of 11 and 15 were compared
with hearing subjects ranging in age from 6 to 15 years
(Taeschner, Devescovi, & Volterra, 1988). The children
were tested in the written modality, using a series of
production items designed to elicit aspects of Italian
bound morphology and free-standing grammatical
morphemes. The relevant structures considered were
the following:
• Pluralization of nouns in Italian requires a modification of the noun ending involving bound morphology (see Table 1);
• Definite articles in Italian are freestanding mor-
phemes that have to agree in gender and number with
the noun to which they refer (see Table 1);
• Clitic pronouns in Italian also agree with their
referents in gender and number. They may be placed
before the verb as a free-standing morpheme or after
the verb as a bound morpheme (see Table 2).
These three quite complex contrasting grammatical
features allowed us to examine the competence of deaf
subjects in written Italian under different linguistic
constraints. On the plural task (with real and nonsense
words), deaf subjects performed like hearing subjects.
On the morpheme-ordering tasks, their performance
was, in terms of quantity and quality, similar to that of
younger hearing subjects, suggesting a pattern of delay
rather than deviance. For example, deaf subjects and
younger hearing subjects preferred a preverbal position
of clitic pronouns, answering incorrectly on those sentences that require a postverbal position. However, on
the article task, deaf subjects performed like younger
hearing children but sometimes relied on an idiosyncratic and incorrect agreement strategy that was not
observed in younger hearing children (le fucile instead
of ifucili and i notti instead of le notti).
Overall, these results on the article task suggest
that deaf children show "a qualitatively different pat-
Written Language Abilities in Deaf Italians
233
Table 2 Clitic pronoun ordering in Italian
With some verbs the clitic may be used
in either preverbal or postverbal
position.
With other verbs, only one of
two positions is allowed.
Preverbal position
Correct form with pronoun
Wrong form
Postverbal position
Correct form with pronoun
Wrong form
Italian
English translation
I bambini varmo a comprare ilgelato.
I bambini lo vanno a comprare.
I bambini vanno a comprarlo.
The children are going to buy the ice cream.
The children it are going to buy.
The children are going to buy it.
La
La
La
La
La
La
The
The
The
The
The
The
bambinafa cadere ilpiatto.
bambino lofa cadere.
bambinafa caderlo*.
nonna cerca di acchiappare ilgatto.
nonna cerca di acchiapparlo.
nonna lo* cerca di acchiappare.
tern of development not observed in children with normal hearing" (Taeschner et al., 1988, p. 398), at least
for some aspects of Italian, in the written form. However, because the deaf sample included children with
and without sign language experience, these results
cannot be attributed to interference between signed
and spoken language, nor do they clarify the role of
sign language competence in oral language learning.
Furthermore, our first study focused on grammatical
morphology and not on other aspects of language (e.g.,
lexicon and syntax).
The latter issue was addressed by Volterra and
Bates (1989) in a case study of a native signer deaf
woman who has achieved a remarkably good control
over written and spoken Italian. In particular, we examined just how far a deaf learner can go under ideal conditions, focusing on the linguistic patterns that may occur at the highest level of language acquisition by the
Italian deaf. The deaf subject (called Z) produced complex and well-formed syntactic constructions, and her
use of the lexical and syntactic structures of Italian was
comparable to that of a highly educated hearing agematched adult who was a native speaker of the language. Nevertheless, she produced a large and systematic number of errors in her spontaneous speech and
writing. Examples of Z's spoken and written language
were compared with equivalent samples of a subject
(BC) who acquired Italian as a second language after
16 years of age.
Table 3 summarizes the nonstandard forms produced by Z and BC, respectively: Interesting similarities and differences can be observed. The nonstandard
forms produced by Z were almost exclusively morpho-
girl drops the plate.
girl it causes to fall.
girl causes to fall-it*.
grandmother tries to catch the cat.
grandmother is trying to catch-it.
grandmother it* is trying to catch.
Table 3 Overview of nonstandard forms in Z's and BC's
letters
Z
BC
208
20.8
7.6
91.8
0.4
276
55.2
34.4
59.4
6.1
Distribution of nonstandard forms
Total no. of nonstandard forms
Mean no. of nonstandard forms per letter
Lexical nonstandard forms (%)
Morphological nonstandard forms (%)
Other nonstandard forms (%)
% of total no. of morph. nonstandard forms
Bound morphology
21.4
Free morphology
78.5
Nonstandard forms involving gender
9.4
Nonstandard forms by part of speech (%)
Nouns
1.6
Adjectives and participles
7.8
7.7
Verbs
26.7
Articles
40.3
Prepositions
Pronouns
13.1
Conjunctions
2.6
43.2
56.7
40.2
10.4
28.7
3.0
31.1
15.9
9.1
1.8
logical. By contrast, BC also produced a large number
of lexical nonstandard forms that did not occur in Z's
corpus. Z's morphological errors were restricted primarily to free-standing function words and certain aspects of agreement morphology, while BC committed
roughly equal numbers of bound and free morpheme
violations. BC produced a very high proportion of gender errors; in Z's corpus, gender errors were very rare.
The results of this second study show that a deaf subject can achieve almost native levels of competence in
written Italian, at least for lexical and syntactic aspects.
Nevertheless, she displayed marked and very specific
difficulties in the spontaneous production of grammat-
234
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 3:3 Summer 1998
Table 4
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Deaf subjects
Sex, age
Yrs schooling
Hearing loss
Onset
Discovery
Prosthesis
of deafness
F, 20
M, 37
M, 28
M, 21
F,41
F,42
F,22
F, 23
M, 26
F,32
12
Profound
Profound
Profound
Profound
Profound
Profound
Profound
Moderate
Profound
Profound
Birth
Birth
Birth?
Birth
Birth?
Birth
Birth
3 months
Birth
Birth
In
In
In
In
In
In
In
In
In
In
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
Yes
No
No
8
13
14
13
8
13
13
13
11
1st yr
1st yr
1st yr
1st yr
1st yr?
1st yr
1st yr
1st yr
1st yr
1st yr
For all these subjects, both parents were deaf. And all subjects were exposed to LIS at birth.
ical morphology, particularly of free standing function
words.
These two studies provide insights into the specific
problems experienced by deaf learners of Italian, but
they leave open many questions about the possible relationship between sign language competence, deafness,
and writing abilities. The present study is part of a
larger research project comparing written language by
Italian deaf people with production of Italian Sign
Language or LIS (Fabbretti, 1997). The focus of the
present article is on the nonstandard linguistic forms
produced by Italian deaf adults in different writing
tasks. The main goals of the present study are: (1) to
replicate the pattern of difficulties observed in previous
studies in a homogeneous sample of deaf native signers,
under different task constraints; (2) to compare the
written Italian of hearing versus deaf native signers, in
order to disentangle the possible influence of early exposure to Sign Language from the influence of deafness itself; (3) to compare performance by deaf signers
with that of hearing subjects with poor schooling and
no knowledge of sign language, separating the effects
of deafness and Sign Language exposure from the
effects of low familiarity with writing activities.
Method
Subjects
A group of 10 deaf adults was selected from a larger
population according to the following criteria: all subjects had deaf parents and were LIS native signers.
This group of deaf subjects (DD) includes six females
and four males with a mean age of 29 years. Their sociocultural status could be defined as middle (mean age
of schooling: 12 years). Subject information, obtained
from an interview, are reported in Table 4. All subjects
attended special schools for the Deaf where Sign Language never played an explicit role in educational practice, although its use was tolerated among deaf students
outside the classroom. Only recently Sign Language is
beginning to achieve official recognition in Italy (Corazza,1993; Pizzuto, 1986; Porcari Li Destri & Volterra,
1995).
All subjects (with the exception of subject 8) defined themselves as profoundly deaf from birth, and
none of them claimed to wear hearing aids. All subjects
have had frequent contacts with the Deaf community,
and at the time of the study they were involved in activities related to the deaf world.
The written production of these 10 deaf subjects
was compared with written production in two control
groups: (1) a group of 10 hearing subjects with deaf
parents (hearing-of-deaf, or HD), with early exposure
to LIS; (2) a group of 10 hearing subjects who have had
no contact with deaf people or sign language (hearingof-hearing, or HH). The HD subjects included seven
females and three males, with a mean age of 30 years
and a mean educational level of 12 years, comparable
to our DD subjects. Eight HD subjects had two deaf
parents, while two subjects had a deaf father and a
hearing mother. The HH group included eight females
and two males with a mean age of 27 years. Their sociocultural status could be defined as low (mean age of
schooling: 9 years).
Written Language Abilities in Deaf Italians 235
Material
Four different writing tasks were used in the present
study:
1. writing a report of a Laurel and Hardy video;
2. writing a report of a video of deaf people playing
cards and commenting on their game in LIS;
3. writing a report of a story about a theft signed by
a deaf native signer in LIS; and
4. writing a letter.
Laurel and Hardy. The video is part of a comic action
movie of Laurel and Hardy {Pardon Us, 1931) where
the two protagonists are involved in a prison revolt. We
selected three minutes from a larger video used by another researcher in a previous study (Day, 1994). The
video was presented without audio, and all Italian subjects could take very little advantage of lipreading because the language of the movie was English.
Cards. The video is part of a larger video recorded in a
Deaf club. The one minute selected shows three deaf
women playing cards and making comments on the
game in LIS.
Theft. The video contains a sign language story narration telling about the theft of a necklace, a real event
experienced and reported by a deaf native signer.
Letter. The subjects were requested to write a letter to
decline an invitation to a friend's wedding.
Procedure
All subjects in the DD and HD groups were given all
four tasks, while the subjects of the HH group who did
not know Sign Language were given only the Laurel
and Hardy and the letter tasks.
Each DD and HD subject was tested individually
in a quiet room in one or two sessions without any time
pressure. The videos were presented by an examiner
with LIS competence. At the end of each video, the
examiner asked the deaf and hearing subjects to sign
and to write what they had watched. The videos were
always presented twice, one at a time in the same order
(Laurel and Hardy, cards, and theft). Half of the sub-
jects were requested to sign and then to write, and half
of the subjects were requested to write and then to sign.
The requests were presented in LIS to the deaf subjects and in spoken language to the hearing subjects. At
the end of each video session, the subjects were requested to write the letter.
The HH' subjects were all tested together. They
were requested to write down what they saw in the
Laurel and Hardy video, and then to write the letter
(only one subject refused to write the letter).
The sign language productions were videorecorded
and then transcribed (for more details on Sign Language data, see Fabbretti, 1997). The texts written by
all subjects were processed with TEXTUS system, a
computerized system for transcribing and analyzing
written language (Garcia Hidalgo, 1996). In this study
we have adapted the transcription conventions of that
system to the nonstandard written language of deaf
people. Data analysis within the larger project has focused on different aspects of written ability, including
production of linguistic and orthographic nonstandard
forms, text structure, forms of reference construction
and maintenance, relationships between nonstandard
form production and textual organization, and relationships between writing and LIS production. In this
article, we restrict our report to the analysis of nonstandard forms.
Results
The number of words in each written text was first calculated as a measure of text length. Each text was then
divided into clauses, cast into standardized Italian, and
coded. A clause unit was identified by the presence of
an explicit or implicit verb. The standardization of a
written text is a complex procedure that requires a degree of interpretation, because the written language
produced by these deaf subjects is far from standard
Italian in orthography, lexical selection, and morphosyntax. We have chosen to standardize orthographic
aspects, but not punctuation because it has no welldefined rules (Ferreiro, Pontecorvo, Moreira, & Hidalgo, 1996). Linguistic aspects were standardized with
reference to standard Italian language norms, taking
into account the writer's presumed intentions. The following example shows some of the risks involved in the
236
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 3:3 Summer 1998
Table 5 Means (and standard deviations) of number of words in each text and for each subject group
Deaf(DD)
Hearing (HD)
Hearing (HH)
L&H
Mean (SD)
Cards
Mean (SD)
Theft
Mean (SD)
Letter
Mean (SD)
211(74,0)
236 (92, 5)
120 (53, 6)
118(43,1)
144 (69, 2)
216(55,4)
224 (52, 1)
118(80,1)
161 (128, 6)
105 (50, 6)
Table 6 Means (and standard deviations) of number of words in each text and for each subject group (only classifiable
clauses)
Deaf(DD)
Hearing (HD)
Hearing (HH)
L&H
Mean (SD)
Cards
Mean (SD)
Theft
Mean (SD)
Letter
Mean (SD)
126 (55, 2)
236 (92, 5)
120 (53, 6)
79 (29, 9)
144 (69, 2)
154 (44, 5)
224 (52, 1)
80 (53, 4)
161 (128, 6)
105 (50, 6)
standardization procedure: una ragazza aggressiva a me
ruba mia collana (a girl aggressive to me steals my necklace). This sentence can be standardized in two different ways: una ragazza aggressiva mi ruba la collana (a girl
aggressive me steals the necklace = an aggressive girl is
stealing my necklace) or as una ragazza mi ha aggredito mi
ha rubato la collana (a girl me has attacked me has stolen
the necklace = a girl has attacked me and she has stolen
my necklace).
In order to reduce the risks of the standardization
procedure, we asked an independent second judge to
standardize the same texts. Clauses on which the two
judges agreed were defined as classifiable; clauses on
which the two judges disagreed were defined as not
classifiable. On a total of 1,513 clauses in the four text
types written by the 10 deaf subjects, 71% of the
clauses were classifiable (1,073/1,513).
At first we considered text length. Table 5 shows
the number of words (means and standard deviations)
produced for each text type, and by each group of subjects, including both classifiable and nonclassifiable
clauses. It is clear from this table that deaf subjects
tended to write shorter texts than HD subjects, but
longer texts than HH subjects. Table 6 reports comparable data for classifiable clauses only.
Comparing the original text with the standardized
one, we could codify the linguistic nonstandard forms.2
On the basis of previous procedures proposed (Mykelbust, 1964; Volterra & Bates, 1989), we have developed
a descriptive taxonomy of these forms. According to
this taxonomy, omission, addition, and substitution
were identified in both linguistic areas considered
(grammatical-morphological and lexical). Omissions
were defined as the absence of a linguistic item in an
obligatory context. Additions were defined as the (inappropriate) presence of an item in a linguistic context
that does not require it. Substitutions were defined as
the substitution of a standard target by a nonstandard
form. With regard to the linguistic areas involved, the
term grammatical-morphological was referred to standard or nonstandard articles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, verb inflections, and
forms of agreement (such as the form lefacilereported
in the introduction); lexical was referred to standard
or nonstandard nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
Table 7 reports some typical examples for each category in this taxonomy.
In order to complete the taxonomy, we considered
two other aspects of written language: orthographic
nonstandard forms and word order violations. Examples of orthographic nonstandard forms are desidevano instead of the correct form desideravano (they
wanted), approffitato instead of the correct form approfittato (profited), quel uomo instead of the correct
form quell'uomo (that man).
With regard to word order violations, Italian is a
language that allows several different word orders for
any given sentence, with marked orders frequently
used to achieve emphasis or text cohesion. Thus, the
category of word order violations was referred only to
those sentences that were frankly ungrammatical, for
example che successo e (what happened is) instead of che e
Written Language Abilities in Deaf Italians
237
Table 7 Omissions, additions, and substitutions of grammatical, morphological, and lexical elements
Omissions
Grammatical-morphological
Lexical
Stanlio prende 0 (il) pane
Stan take (the) bread
In questo periodo hai avuto molti 0 (impegni) per ipreparativi
del matrimonio
In this period you have had many (commitments) for the
wedding arrangements
Perchenon aveva potuto 0 (seguire) I'ordine numerico
Because she could not (follow) the order of numbers
Stanlio ha chiesto 0 (a) Ollio
Stan asked (to) Oliver
Che 0 (e) successo
What (is) happened
E la moglie 0 (lo) ha lasctato andare
And the wife let (it) go
E lui 0 (si) difendeva
And he defended (himself)
Additions
Substitutions
Poi la sua moglie disse
Per cui non sanno dove erano duel tosto
Then the his wife said
Poisiescappata
Then herself she is escaped
II marito desiderava di uscire con gli amici
The husband wanted of go out with friends
Ollio gli ha risposto male con (a) quel uomo
Oliver answered rudely with (to) that man
So they do not know where they are that place
In quel momento quella ragazza voleva rubare il collare (la
coliana) d'oro
In that moment the girl wanted to steal the gold collar
(necklace)
Prima cosa succedere (succede)
First what to happen ('s happened)
Cosi aprire (ha aperto) di nuovo la porta
Thus to open (opened) the door again
Omissions are indicated by 0, nonstandard forms are underlined, and standardized forms are reported in parenthesis.
successo (what is happened), or the incorrect prenominal
adjectival form il mio gigante regalo (my gigantic present), instead of the correct postnominal adjectival form
il mio regalo gigante (my- present gigantic).
We checked the distribution of nonstandard forms
in the classifiable and not classifiable clauses, and we
have found that, across all texts, 50% of the identifiable
nonstandard forms occurred in the classifiable clauses,
while the remaining 50% of the errors occurred in the
nonclassifiable clauses. A comparison between classifiable and nonclassifiable clauses revealed that the distribution of nonstandard forms was similar in the two
corpora, with one exception: nonstandard orthographic forms represent 16% of the nonstandard forms
of all clauses and 21% of the nonstandard forms of the
classifiable clauses. On the whole these findings reveal
that the samples of linguistic forms in the classifiable
clauses were representative of the forms that occurred
in the whole corpus.
In order to investigate the pattern of difficulties ex-
hibited by the deaf group in the different writing tasks,
we carried out a more detailed analysis to examine the
effect of text type on the distribution of nonstandard
forms within the deaf group only. In these analyses we
did not considered word order violations because they
were very rare (Laurel and Hardy = 0,1; theft = 0,1;
letter = 0,4; cards = 0,2).
In a first analysis we merged data according to the
areas involved. An overall measure of nonstandard
grammatical-morphological forms was obtained for
each text type by merging grammatical-morphological
omissions, additions, and substitutions. A parallel measure of nonstandard lexical forms was obtained for each
text type by merging lexical omissions, additions, and
substitutions. All proportion scores (number of nonstandard forms over total number of words) were normalized using an arcsin transformation. These two
global measures were compared with each other and
with proportion scores for nonstandard orthographic
forms in a 3 X 4 multivariate analysis of variance
238
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 3:3 Summer 1998
• morphological
1
• lexical
0,9
0,8
•
orthographic
0,7
0,6
0,5
0,4
0,3
0,2
0,1
0
•+-
L&H
Cards
•+-
•+•
Theft
Letter
Figure 1 Mean distribution of nonstandard forms by text and type in the deaf group.
(ANOVA) comparing form type (grammaticalmorphological, lexical, and orthographic), and text
type (separate scores for each of the four text conditions). This analysis yielded a significant main effect
for form type, F = 30.68; df= 2; p = .0000. A series
of Duncan multiple range tests, which was used to
compare the three means, indicated that nonstandard
grammatical-morphological forms occurred with significantly greater frequency than either lexical (/> £
.01) or orthographic nonstandard forms (p :£ .01). The
analysis also yielded a significant main effect for text
type, F= 6 .51; df= 3; /> = .0019. A series of Duncan
multiple range tests, which was used to compare the
four means, indicated that nonstandard forms occurred
with significantly smaller frequency in the letter text
than other texts (/> s .05), which did not differ significantly from each other. Finally, there was also a significant interaction between form and text type, F =
3.50; df= 6; p = .0053. This interaction is illustrated
in Figure 1, which shows the mean distribution of the
different nonstandard forms within each text. The significant interaction is due primarily to the inflated ratio
of nonstandard orthographic forms in the Laurel and
Hardy text, due primarily to the spelling of the two
proper names Stanlio and OUio (Stan and Laurel),
names that are difficult for any Italian writer. In addition, the interaction reflects a particularly high ratio of
nonstandard grammatical-morphological and lexical
forms in the cards text.
In a second analysis we merged data according to
the form identified, that is, omission, substitution, or
addition. A global score for each form was obtained for
each text type by merging grammatical-morphological
and lexical forms within each category (e.g., omission
of lexical or grammatical forms; substitution of lexical
or grammatical forms; addition of lexical or grammatical forms). All proportion scores were normalized with
an arcsin transformation. A 3 X 4 multivariate ANOVA comparing nonstandard forms and text type
yielded a significant main effect for strategy, F = 10.36;
df = 2; p = .0010. Duncan multiple range tests, used
to compare the three means, indicated that omissions
and substitutions (which did not differ from each
other) occurred with significantly greater frequency
than additions (p S .01). There was also a significant
main effect of text type, F = 5.06; df= 3; p = .0064.
Duncan multiple range tests, used to compare the four
means, indicated that nonstandard forms occurred
with significantly greater frequency in the cards text
than letter text (p S .05) and Laurel and Hardy text (p
s .05). The interaction between nonstandard form
type and text type did not reach significance, F = 1.25;
df=6; p= .2943).
In the last analysis we classified the data to reflect
the distinction between free and bound morphology.
Proportion scores for nonstandard grammatical forms
were collapsed across omissions, additions, and substitutions and normalized using arcsin transformations.
Written Language Abilities in Deaf Italians
239
Table 8 Examples of nonstandard forms referring to bound morphology
Example
Explanation
Primo cosa succedere* —» prima cosa succede
Wrong verb inflection for mood: infinitive form "succedere"
instead of "succede"
Wrong verb inflection for person: 3rd person "comincia" instead
of 1st person "comincio"
Wrong verb inflection for number: sing, form "era" instead of
plur. form "erano"; it sounds correct in Engl. because only sing.
"hair" is used
Wrong verb inflection for tense in 2nd coordinate sentence: future
"andra" instead of comp. past tense "e andata" as in the first
sentence
First what to happen
Comincia*io —> comincio io
I starts
Come era*i capell?. —> come erano i capelli?
How was the hair?
Allora leie uscita con la macchina e andrd*ingiro —»
allora lei e uscita con la macchina e e andata in giro
then she went out with the car and she will go
around
Gli* armi —> le armi
the weapons
Circa 2 milione* —» circa 2 milioni
About 2 million
Wrong gender agreement between article and noun: plur.
masculine article "gli" instead of plur. feminine article "le"
Wrong number agreement between noun and modifier: sing, noun
"milione" instead of plur. noun "milioni"
Free morphology was defined to include omissions,
substitutions, and/or additions of articles, prepositions, pronouns (full and clitic), conjunctions and connectives, auxiliary verbs, modal verbs (such as dovere =
must, potere = can, volere = to want) and others verbs
involved in complex syntactic structure (i.e., continuare
a = to continue, to + verb). Bound morphology was
defined to include all nonstandard productions involving agreement and verb inflections. Recall that the Italian verb system requires inflections for tense, aspect,
mood of the verb, person, number, and sometimes the
subject's gender. Thus, many nonstandard inflectional
forms were possible. Table 8 provides some examples
of nonstandard bound morphology.
A 2 X 4 multivariate ANOVA compared form type
(free versus bound) with text type. This analysis
yielded a significant main effect for form type, F =
41.20; df= 1; p = .0001, indicating higher production
of nonstandard free morphology compared with nonstandard bound morphology. There was no significant
main effect of text type, F = 2.19; df= 3; p = .1119,
and no significant interaction between form and text
type, F = 1.10; df= 3; p = .3650. On the whole these
results show a complex pattern of difficulties in the
texts written by deaf subjects (native signers) that tends
to confirm results of previous studies with single-case
studies or less homogeneous samples on written language abilities in the Italian deaf.
The other goals of our study were to compare the
written Italian of deaf subjects with that of hearing na-
tive signers and with that of hearing subjects with poor
schooling . Figures 2 through 5 illustrate the mean ratio (%) of each type of nonstandard form against the
total number of words in each text, in each of the three
groups of subjects. Deaf subjects produced, on the
whole, more nonstandard forms than hearing subjects
(HD and HH): this result did not depend on text
length, which was taken into account by these proportion scores (although it is worth noting that deaf subjects produced their high proportion of nonstandard
forms within shorter texts than those produced by
hearing subjects).
The most frequent nonstandard linguistic forms in
all texts produced by DD subjects were grammaticalmorphological omissions followed by grammaticalmorphological substitutions, lexical substitutions, and
grammatical-morphological additions. Less frequent
were lexical omissions and word order violations,
which in all texts never reached a mean of 1%. Almost
nonexistent were lexical additions.
In all texts produced by hearing subjects (HD and
HH), production of nonstandard linguistic forms never
exceeded a mean of 1%. In other words, hearing subjects produced some of the same forms produced by
deaf subjects, but they were very rare.
In general, the deaf subjects also produced more
nonstandard orthographic forms than hearing subjects,
across all text types. Proportionally, however, deaf subjects produced more linguistic than orthographic nonstandard forms, while hearing subjects showed the op-
240
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 3:3 Summer 1998
Laurel & Hardy
• DD
• HD
13 HH
ord
orrg
ortho
Figure 2 Nonstandard forms in Laurel and Hardy text, omg = grammatical-morphological
omissions; oml = lexical omissions; adg = grammatical-morphological additions; adl = lexical additions; sug = grammatical-morphological substitutions; sul = lexical substitutions;
ord = word order violations; ortho = orthographic.
Cards
• DD
DHD
omg
oml
adg
agl
sug
sul
ord
ortho
Figure 3 Nonstandard forms in Cards text (see Figure 2 for explanation of abbreviations).
posite pattern. The only exception to this general
pattern occurred in the Laurel and Hardy text, where
deaf and hearing subjects both produced a high ratio
of orthographic nonstandard forms, reflecting the
difficulty that Italian writers experienced in spelling
the names Stanlio and Ollio.
An ANOVA carried on the Laurel and Hardy text,
which was the text with a larger number of nonstan-
dard orthographic forms, showed significant differences between groups, F = 9.107; df= 2;p= .0009. A
series of Duncan multiple range tests, used to compare
the three means, indicated that deaf subjects produced
many more nonstandard forms than HD subjects (p S
.01) and HH subjects (p ^ .01) while the two hearing
groups did not differ each other.
Written Language Abilities in Deaf Italians
241
Theft
• DD
• HD
omg
oml
adg
adl
sug
sul
ord
ortho
Figure 4 Nonstandard forms in Theft text (see Figure 2 for explanation of abbreviations).
Letter
• DD
• HD
UHH
orng
oml
adg
adl
sug
sul
ord
ortho
Figure 5 Nonstandard forms in Letter text (see Figure 2 for explanation of abbreviations).
Discussion
Results of the present study replicate previous findings
regarding the writing abilities in adult deaf subjects. In
particular they replicate, with more subjects, findings
from the case study reported by Volterra and Bates
(1989). Like the case of Z reported by Volterra and
Bates, the 10 deaf native signers studied here displayed
a pattern of selective difficulty with Italian grammatical
morphology, especially with free-standing function
words. Interestingly, even though the Italian language
provides many opportunities for errors of bound morphology on nouns and verbs, such errors were infrequent in deaf subjects. Probably deaf subjects access
some aspects of bound morphology (as plural) by rote,
without breaking the word into root plus suffix. Italian
nouns and verbs (as well as adjectives) never occur as
bare roots without inflectional morphemes (see also
Pizzuto & Caselli, 1992, 1994).
The four different writing tasks used in the present
242 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 3:3 Summer 1998
study yielded results indicating that text type did influence our assessment of writing abilities. For example, the letter task was a more familiar writing context for our deaf and hearing subjects, and it also
appeared to be significantly easier for our subjects than
written reports of video materials. Of the three video
descriptions, the cards text appeared to be especially
difficult for our deaf subjects. This is probably not due
to the fact that cards required an Italian description of
an LIS conversation, because the relatively easy theft
text presented subjects with the same problem. We may
speculate that the cards task was particularly difficult
for our subjects because of its content, a conversation,
with no story line and no named characters (so that, for
example, subjects were forced to come up with descriptions like "woman on the lefjf," "first player," and so
forth).
On the whole deaf subjects produced more linguistic nonstandard forms than hearing subjects. However
the pattern of difficulties exhibited was interestingly
different: deaf subjects produced more linguistic than
orthografic nonstandard forms, while hearing subjects
showed the opposite. This finding confirms the observation that conventional spelling is one area of written
language in which deaf people experience relatively
fewer difficulties (Mayer & Wells, 1996).
A comparison of the texts written by deaf native
signers with those of hearing native signers confirms
the view that difficulties in the acquisition of written
Italian are best explained by deafness itself, and not by
the influence of a previously acquired Sign Language.
This finding is supported also by data on word order
violations. If our DD or HD subjects were experiencing significant interference from LIS, we would, expect
to find many word order violations, reflecting major
differences between word order in written Italian and
sign order in LIS. Instead, our data revealed very few
word order violations.
We also compared our deaf subjects with hearing
individuals who had no exposure to sign language, but
shared with our deaf subjects a relatively low familiarity with written discourse. This comparison clearly
showed that deaf subjects produce nonstandard linguistic forms (especially grammatical forms) that are
never produced or rarely produced by hearing subjects
with low levels of school attendance. Hence, the specific difficulties with grammatical morphology displayed by our deaf subjects cannot be attributed solely
to their limited experience with written Italian.
Our findings are compatible with the claim that
acoustic perception plays a special role in the acquisition and use of grammatical morphology (Caselli, Maragna, Pagliari Rampelli, & Volterra, 1994). In particular, deaf people have specific problems with those parts
of speech that are identifiable only through the acoustic
channel and for which no other channel can play a similarly reliable role. This hypothesis can be supported
by the following observations. Italian free-standing
morphemes are short items that tend to convey relatively little semantic content in their own right This
disadvantage is offset in part by their high frequency in
the language, at least for hearing speakers. But in the
case of the deaf, the frequency of these items looks very
different: many Italian morphological forms tend to be
short items produced rapidly and with low stress in
fluent oral discourse. It is possible to pick up many of
or most of these forms in skilled lip-reading, but is far
from easy. This state of affairs may mean that deaf
speakers of Italian are often failing to receive and encode morphological markers. Their input may thus
consist much of the time of "islands" of content words
in properly sequenced syntactic frames. Because of this
degraded input, the deaf learner of an oral language
literally has less "practice," fewer opportunities to observe the application of morphological processes. Similar observations have been made on the acquisition of
English morphology by deaf students. As noted by
Hanson and Wilkenfeld (1985), among others, the absence of acoustic/articulatory mediation should have
especially severe consequences for the acquisition of
grammatical morphology, including the production
and (perhaps) comprehension of prepositions, articles,
pronouns, and other free-standing grammatical morphemes. Some evidence by De Villiers and De Villiers
(1986) suggests that English deaf students may experience more severe problems with free-standing function
words than they demonstrate in tests of syntactic
tructure.
In addition, specific difficulties with written language may derive from the ways in which spoken Ital-
Written Language Abilities in Deaf Italians 243
ian is learned by deaf children, or from the relationship
between written and oral language. Educational principles, methodology, and practice emphasize the acquisition of spoken and written Italian. The use of manual
communication methods or sign language is beginning
to be considerd only recently in educational practice
(Caselli et al., 1994). Children who are born profoundly deaf can learn the oral language spoken around
them only through intense formal training that lasts
many years. Hence, the written language acquired by
these individuals is based on an oral language acquired
late. In short, deaf children must learn, mainly through
the visual modality, a language that evolved to meet the
problems and opportunities provided by the acoustic
modality.
Newport and Supalla (1992) have suggested that
grammatical morphology is particularly difficult to acquire after the putative critical period for language. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that grammatical
morphology presents a particularly serious problem for
second language learners, including deaf subjects who
are acquiring the visual-spatial morphology of American Sign Language (ASL) at a later age than normal
age. We may find that a critical period account and an
account based on phonetic/phonological mechanisms
are not mutually exclusive. In both cases, spoken languages and sign languages, those aspects of grammatical morphology more related to code of transmission
(the acoustic for spoken and the visual for sign) have to
be learned earlier in life. Grammatical morphology in
Italian and LIS rely on very different mechanisms: Italian uses many function words, whereas LIS adopts location in space, modulations of movement, and classifiers to convey similar meanings. Many free
morphemes that deaf subjects omit or substitute in
written Italian do not occur in LIS.
Our results have also implications for language
teaching for the deaf. New teaching strategies have to
be devised to overcome the specific difficulties that deaf
people encounter in the visual learning of an auditory
language. In particular, one cannot assume oral competence when written language is introduced, and special
efforts must be made to highlight aspects of language
that particularly depend on acoustic cues simply unavailable to the deaf child and are not marked in any
obvious way in the written code. Italian teachers of the
deaf must use particular strategies to overcome these
difficulties trying to expose deaf children to written
Italian in playful but systematic contexts.
We are aware that the present study has some
methodology limitations: certainly we would need a
great deal more data comparing deaf and hearing subjects with comparable background. In the future we
plan to conduct, and other researchers should also focus on, a careful comparison between written and
signed production (in deaf and hearing subjects) in order to identify possible ways to use contrastive analysis
between LIS and written Italian as a strategy for teaching specific aspects of Italian lexical and morphological
systems (Favia & Maragna, 1995). The data we collected on sign language and written texts produced by
the same deaf subjects could offer valuable material as
contribution to the current debate on bilingualbicultural models of literacy education for deaf students (Mason, 1997; Mayer & Wells, 1996, 1997). In
order to understand the different roles that LIS and
Italian have to play in the literacy development of the
deaf child, we have to analyze more carefully and systematically similarities and differences between LISsigned texts and Italian written texts.
Notes
1. According to the classification suggested by the BIAP
(Bureau International d'Audiophonologie), Italian audiologists
have adopted the following classification of hearing loss: mild
(lieve): 20-40 dB, moderate (media): 40-70 dB, severe (grave):
70-90 dB, profound (profonda): 90 dB and above.
2. We prefer not to use the word "error" in analyzing these
forms because it entails a negative perspective. On the other
hand, if we consider these texts without a valuative and normative perspective, they contain much information about the writers' knowledge and about what the writers can do rather than
what they cannot do (Dulay, Burt, & Krashen, 1982; Ferreiro et
al., 1996; Pontecorvo & Orsolini, 1996).
References
Anderson, J. (1993). Deaf student mis-writing teacher mis-reading.
English education and the deaf college student. Burtonsville,
MD: Linstok.
Caselli, M. C , Maragna, S., Rampelli, L. P., & Volterra, V.
(1994). Linguaggio e sordila. Florence: La Nuova Italia.
244
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 3:3 Summer 1998
Caselli, M. C , & Volterra, V. (1993). "Vedere" l'italiano: il caso
dei sordi. In E. Cresti & M. Moneglia (Eds.), Ricerche sulI'acquisizione dell'italiano. Rome: Bulzoni.
Cooper, R. (1967). The ability of deaf and hearing children to
apply morphological rules. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 10, 77-86.
Corazza, S. (1993). The history of sign language in Italian education of the deaf. In R. Fischer & H. Lane (Eds.), Looking
back. A reader on the history of Deaf communities and their sign
languages. Hamburg: Signum Press.
Day, L. (1994). Sign language acquisition of deaf adults in deaf and
hearing families. Diploma in Social Sciences (Deaf Studies),
September.
De Villiers, J., & De Villiers, P. (1986). Parallels and divergens
in the acquisition of oral English by deaf and hearing children:
Evidence for structural constraints. Paper presented at the
Eleventh Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.
Dulay, R , Burt, M , & Krashen, S. (1982). Language two. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fabbretti, D. (1997). Scrivere e segnare: la costruzione del discorso
neU'italiano scritto e nella Lingua Italiana dei Segni delle persone sorde [Writing and signing: The discourse construction
in Italian written language and in Italian Sign Language of
the deaf people]. Doctoral dissertation, University of Rome,
Faculty of Psychology.
Favia, M. L., & Maragna, S. (1995). Una scuola oltre le parole. Manuale per I'istruzione dei sordi. Florence: La Nuova
Italia.
Ferreiro, E., Pontecorvo, C , Moreira, N., & Hidalgo, I. G.
(1996). Cappuccetto Rosso impara a scrivere. Studi psicolinguistici in tre lingue romanze. Florence: La Nuova Italia.
Garcia Hidalgo, I. (1996). The Textus system. In G. Rijlaarsdam,
H. van den Bergh, & M. Couzijn (Eds.), Theories, models and
methodology in writing research. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press.
Gaustad, M. G. (1986). Longitudinal effects of manual English
instruction on deaf children's morphological skills. Applied
Psycholinguistics, 7, 101-128.
Gregory, S. (1995). The written language of deaf children educated
through a bilingual approach. Presented at the Child Language Seminar, Bristol, April 7-9, 1995.
Hanson, V., & Wilkenfeld, D. (1985). Morphophonology and
lexical organization in deaf readers. Language and Speech,
28, 269-280.
Kelly, L. P. (1987). The influence of syntactic anomalies on the
writing processes of a deaf college student. In A. Matsuhashi
(Ed.), Writing in real time. Modelling production processes.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Mason, D. (1997). Response to Mayer and Wells: The answer
should be affirmative. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 2, 276-279.
Maxwell, M. M., & Falick, T. G. (1992). Cohesion & quality in
deaf & hearing children's written english. Sign Language
Studies, 77, 345-372.
Mayer, C , & Wells, G. (1996). Can the linguistic interdependence theory support a bilingual-bicultural model of literacy
education for deaf students? Journal ofDeaf Studies and Deaf
Education, 1, 93-107.
Mayer, C , & Wells, G. (1997). The question remains: A rejoinder to Mason. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education,
2, 280-282.
Mykelbust, H. R. (1964). The psychology of deafness. New York:
Grune and Stratton.
Newport, E. L., & Supalla, T. (1992). Critical period effects in the
acquisition of a primary language: I. The influence ofmaturational state on the acquisition of complex morphology in American Sign Language. Manuscript under revision.
Paul, P. V, & Quigley, S. P. (1994). Language and deafness. 2nd
ed. San Diego: Singular Publishing Group, Inc.
Pizzuto, E. (1986). Italy. In J. V. Van Cleve (Ed.), Gallaudel encyclopedia of deaf people and deafness. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Pizzuto, E., & Caselli, M. C. (1992). The acquisition of Italian
morphology: Implications for models of language development. Journal of Child Language, 19, 491-557.
Pizzuto, E., & Caselli, M. C. (1994). The acquisition of Italian
verb morphology in a crosslinguistic perspective. In Y. Levy
(Ed.), Other children, other languages. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Pontecorvo, C , & Orsolini, M. (1996). Writing and written language in children's development. In C. Pontecorvo, M. Orsolini, B. Burge, & B. Resnick (Eds.), Children's early text
construction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Porcari Li Destri, G., & Volterra, V. (Eds.) (1995). Passatoepresente: uno sguardo sull'educazione dei Sordi in Italia. Naples:
Gnocchi.
Quigley, S. P., & Paul, P. V. (1984). Written language. In S. P.
Quigley & V. Paul (Eds.), Language and deafness. San Diego:
College-Hill Press.
Taeschner, T , Devescovi, A., & Volterra, V. (1988). Affixes and
function words in the written language of deaf children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 385-401.
Volterra, V., & Bates, E. (1989). Selective impairment of Italian
grammatical morphology in the congenitally deaf: A case
study. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 6, 273-308.
Yoshinaga-Itano, C , & Downey, D. M. (1992). When a story is
not a story: a process analysis of the written language of
hearing-impaired children. Volta Review, 2, 131-158.