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The development of discourse referencing in Cantonese of deaf/hard-of-hearing children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2014

FELIX SZE ,
GLADYS TANG ,
TAMMY LAU ,
EMILY LAM  and
CHRIS YIU
FELIX SZE*
Affiliation:
Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
GLADYS TANG
Affiliation:
Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
TAMMY LAU
Affiliation:
Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
EMILY LAM
Affiliation:
Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
CHRIS YIU
Affiliation:
Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
*
Address for correspondence: Felix Sze. e-mail: felix_cslds@cuhk.edu.hk
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Abstract

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-enrolment 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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , March 2015 , pp. 351 - 393
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

[*]

The sign bilingual and co-enrolment programme in which the d/hh children of this study are enrolled is funded by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust under the research project entitled Jockey Club Sign Bilingualism and Co-enrolment in Deaf Education Programme at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. This research paper is one of the research outputs of the programme. We would like to thank the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust for their financial support to this programme.

References

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