HEARING IMPAIRED CHILDREN'S READING COMPREHENSION OF ANAPHORIC RELATIONSHIP

The purpose of the study was to investigate hearing impaired children's comprehension of four anaphoric relationships within conjoined sentences: Type 1. Repetition of the Noun Anaphora; Type 2. Personal Pronoun Anaphora; Type 3. Null Form Anaphora--Semantically Unacceptable Environment for the Use of the Object-subject Deletion Rule; Type 4. Null Form Anaphora--Semantically Acceptable Environment for the Use of the Object-subject Deletion Rule; Type 5. Pro-verb Anaphora. The effect of the object-subject deletion rule on comprehension of Types 3 and 4 was also assessed.;The test instrument consisted of six sentences for each type of anaphora. Each sentence was embedded in a short paragraph which was followed by a multiple-choice wh-question assessing comprehension of the anaphora.;Ten items from the Conjunction 1 subtest of the Test of Syntactic Abilities were administered to 90 prelingually hearing impaired (70 dB or greater) students in order to identify students who used the object-subject deletion rule (Rule Users) and those who did not (Rule Nonusers). The students ranged in age from 10 through 18 years.;Sixteen Rule Users, mean age 16.04 years, and 16 Rule Nonusers, mean age 15.76 years, were given the test instrument on the anaphoric relationships. Mean hearing loss was 93 dB and 92 dB, respectively.;It was hypothesized that both groups of students would obtain their highest scores on Type 1; their next highest on Type 2; and their third highest on Type 3. Rule Nonusers, however, would score equally as high on Type 4 as they did on Type 3 while Rule Users would find Type 4 more difficult. Type 5 was predicted to be the most difficult for both groups.;A 2 (Rule Use) x 5 (Anaphoric Type) repeated measures analysis of variance revealed that a significant difference existed for anaphoric type only. Utilizing Scheffe's ratio, it was found that Type 4 was more difficult than Types 1, 2, and 3 for both groups. No other pairwise comparisons were significant.;It was concluded that, with the exception of Type 4, both groups comprehended the anaphoric relationships well. However, when the semantic environment allowed the use of the object-subject deletion rule, comprehension of the null form anaphora (Type 4) was more difficult.