What is it about?
When telling a story, narrators need to introduce the characters clearly so that the audience can follow what is happening. This study examines how deaf children and adults introduce main characters in Turkish Sign Language (TİD) narratives. We compared native signers, who were exposed to TİD from birth, with late signers, who first encountered TİD when they started school at around the age of six. The participants watched a short wordless video and retold the story in TİD. We examined whether they introduced the two main characters and which linguistic strategies they used, such as lexical signs, classifier constructions, and constructed action.
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Why is it important?
Many deaf children do not have access to a sign language from birth. Late exposure can have lasting effects on some aspects of language development. However, the findings of this study show that certain narrative skills may be more resilient than others. After approximately two and a half years of exposure to TİD, late-signing children introduced the main characters as frequently as native-signing children and adults. They also used similar linguistic strategies. These findings underline the importance of providing deaf children with access to sign language as early as possible, while also showing that meaningful progress can occur even when exposure begins later.
Perspectives
Research on late sign language exposure has often focused on the difficulties experienced by late signers. In this study, we wanted to examine whether all areas of language development are affected in the same way. Our findings suggest a more nuanced picture. Although early access to sign language remains essential, the ability to introduce the main characters of a story appears to be relatively resilient to the effects of late exposure. Late-signing children in our study showed patterns similar to those of native-signing children and adults after only a few years of exposure to TİD. We hope that these findings will contribute to a better understanding of the language development of deaf children and reinforce the need to ensure access to sign language without delay.
Cansu Gür
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This page is a summary of: Learning to introduce referents in narration is resilient to the effects of late sign language exposure, Sign Language & Linguistics, November 2022, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/sll.21004.gur.
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