The Understanding Of Syntactic And Semantic Knowledge In Compound Sentences In Deaf And Hard-of-hearing Students

Deaf and hard-of-hearing(DHH)students tend to perform poorly in reading comprehension.Using the self-paced moving-window paradigm,the present study tried to investigate a cohort of DHH students' understanding of causal and adversative sentences in Chinese.The study consisted of ten experiments.In Experiment 1 and 2,we examined DHH students' understanding of causal and adversative connectives,respectively.In Experiments 3a,3b,4a,and 4b,we investigated their awareness of the semantic relationships between words for taxonomic categories of basic and super-ordinate levels in the reading of these two types of compound sentences.In Experiment 5a,5b,6a,and6 b,we tested the effect of typicality in their reading of these two types of compound sentences.The main findings were as follows:(1)DHH students generally were able to understand causal and adversative connectives in a similar way to how their hearing counterparts did.However,they were more likely than hearing students to have bigger difficulties in understanding adversative than in doing causal connectives.(2)DHH students were largely similar to their hearing peers in being aware of the conceptual relations between words for taxonomic categories of different levels in the reading of compound sentences.However,they seemed to have difficulties associating the category names to the exemplar words in sentence contexts.(3)In a broad sense,their understanding of compound sentences was interactively dependent on their awareness of the semantic association between the word in the first clause and the one in the second clause and their awareness of the syntactic relations between the two clauses.These findings point to the crucial role that connectives play in sentence reading and to the importance of integrating word meanings into coherent contexts as well.Educators should pay close attention to creating learning environments in which DHH students can develop clear awareness of the syntactic relationships and the semantic inter-word relationships in different clauses in the reading of complex sentences.