Deaf Children's Processing And Production Of Chinese Wh-questions

Wh-questions are considered as one of the basic syntactic structures.A survey of 30years' research on wh-question processing showed that previous studies mainly focused on the three aspects: processing subject/object or argument/non-argument asymmetry,difficulty orders of processing wh-questions and L1 transfer.However,the findings of previous studies were often inconsistent or conflicting.For the asymmetry of processing wh-subject/object,some studies supported ?-Government Hypothesis(Stromswold,1995),but others supported Computational Complexity Hypothesis(O'Grady1997).Even in the same study,the comprehension tasks and production tasks yielded different results.For the asymmetry of wh-argument/non-argument,extant literature shows that argument is easier than non-argument to process in English wh-questions,but the asymmetry is controversial in processing Chinese wh-argument/non-argument.The study of the difficulty of processing English wh-questions found that “how” was the most difficult,while processing Chinese wh-questions found that “why” was the most difficult one.Meanwhile,L1 transfer had also been observed as conflicting.Some studies reported that there existed L1 effect on L2 word order,while others did not find such transfer.But the participants in the previous studies are hearing-normal adults.Statistics from the official website of the China Disabled Federation(2013-2016)show that there are 2.57 million deaf people in China with language disabilities.Most deaf children have limited or late exposure to written Chinese.The language development of deaf children has always been proved to be delayed or lagged behind than that of hearing-normal children.They have performed persistent difficulties in many basic Chinese syntactic structures,and the role of sign language in wh-question processing is controversial.So far,little is known about the processing and production of Chinese wh-questions by deaf children.The present study investigated the online processing and off-line production of Chinese wh-questions by Chinese deaf children.In this study,120 deaf children(11;5-17;6)were recruited from Changsha Special Education School,Hunan Province,as the experiment group,and 40 hearing-normal children(8;6-9;5)from an experimental primary school participated as the control group.The three pairs of test materials included Grammatical Judgement Test and Wh-question Making Test,Wh-question Comprehension Test and Wh-question ProductionTest,and Wh-question Fitting Test and Wh-question Correcting Test.Three specific research questions were addressed.1)What is the overall accuracy of deaf children's wh-question processing and production? Is there subject/object asymmetry and argument/non-argument asymmetry in processing and production? 2)What is the difficulty order of wh-question processing and production by deaf groups? What is the difference between deaf children and hearing-normal children if there is any? 3)How would Chinese sign language impact the Chinese wh-question processing and production? Is it a positive or negative transfer?Results of the study showed that: 1)In the Grammatical Judgement Test,deaf children had a longer response time and a lower accuracy rate.There was no significant difference in processing load between wh-subject and wh-object,and there was no asymmetry between subject and object.The deaf children's wh-argument processing was equally difficult than that of non-argument,and no asymmetry between argument and non-argument was found.The results of Grammatical Judgement Test and Wh-question Making Test were consistent,in that the deaf children had persistent syntactic deficit in Chinese wh-question processing and production.These findings were in support of CGCH,yet at odds with GSH.The deaf children demonstrated syntactic deficit in Chinese wh-question processing/production.2)The accuracy of wh-question processing by deaf children was lower than that of hearing-normal children in the Wh-question Comprehension Test and Wh-question Production Test.The difficulty of Chinese wh-question processing and production by deaf children was in the following order from the least to the most: what < where < when ? who < why ?how.The difficulty order of hearing-normal children's processing Chinese wh-question is:who<what<where<when<why<how.The two orders are basically the same,and the only difference is “who” and there exists the syntactic deficit of processing “who”(used as subject/object)by the deaf children.The experiment results of comprehension and production were consistent: The semantic complexity of wh-words had an effect on the deaf children' s wh-question processing and production.3)There was a significant positive correlation between deaf children' sign language proficiency and their Chinese wh-question processing,as reflected by the Wh-question Fitting Test and Wh-question Correcting Test.The deaf children with high levels of sign language had higher accuracy in comprehending andproducing wh-questions.Children with low levels of sign language had a weaker ability in wh-question production.As such,sign language exerted positive transfer to deaf children'understanding Chinese semantic concepts,while it was a negative transfer of word order in constructing syntactic system.This study accorded with the initial hypotheses.The reason for deaf children's difficulty in Chinese wh-question processing lies in the syntactic deficit,which may be related to deaf children's excessive use and much dependence on sign language during the critical period(3-5years old)of syntactic development and establishment.This study supported the Computational Complexity Hypothesis and the Conceptual Transfer Hypothesis;the findings challenged the Generalized Slowing Hypothesis.There was a significant positive correlation between the levels of sign language and the accuracy of wh-question processing and production.Sign language facilitated the processing of Chinese semantic concepts and interfered with the word order of Chinese sentences.Previous studies showed that 3-5 years old could be a critical period for children to build up their syntactic concept system.Deaf children,however,might rely on sign language too much during the critical period,and thus failed to build up Chinese syntactic system effectively,which might trigger their deficit to Chinese syntactic processing and production.The following implications can be concluded from the study: 1)It is found that there is syntactic deficit in deaf children's Chinese wh-question processing and production by examining the Computational Grammatical Complexity Hypothesis.Deaf children's whquestion processing model of Chinese has been speculated based on Conceptual Transfer Hypothesis to explore the nature of deaf children's wh-question processing and production.2)In bilingual-bi-modal teaching for deaf children,the use of sign language should be adapted according to the critical period of syntactic development,which has a great pedagogical significance for deaf children's syntactic learning of Chinese.The amount of Chinese input should be increased to remove deaf children's language barriers into the society.