Abstract
Background: Deaf children vary in the use of and proficiency in signed language. The majority of studies on writing skills of children who are deaf did not assess deaf children's proficiency in signed language and/or grouped together deaf children with varying sign language skills.
Aims: Adopting a bimodal bilingual perspective, we examined evaluative expression, an important narrative tool in both oral/written languages and signed languages, in narratives written in Dutch by deaf children who are proficient in Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) and deaf children who are low‐proficient in SLN, and hearing monolingual and bilingual children. We hypothesized that deaf children who are proficient in signed language use their knowledge of evaluative expression in signed language to enrich their narratives in written Dutch, and more so than deaf children who are low‐proficient in signed language and hearing monolingual and bilingual children.
Methods & Procedures: We examined the use of eight different evaluative devices in narratives written by deaf proficiently and low‐proficiently signing children, and hearing monolingual and bilingual children. Narratives were also examined for morpho‐syntactic errors and use of complex sentences.
Outcomes & Results: The results show that proficiently signing deaf children's narratives contain more evaluative devices that enrich the referential structure of the narrative than narratives of low‐proficiently signing deaf children, and hearing bilingual and monolingual children.
Conclusions & Implications: We propose that proficiently signing deaf children use their knowledge of SLN to convey evaluation in their written narratives, and thus have an advantage in enriching their narratives. This study also shows that in order to gain insight into deaf people's writing, it is important to take variations in sign language proficiency into account.
Notes
1. Sign Supported Dutch is clearly distinguished from SLN. Sign Supported Dutch is a sign system derived from spoken Dutch; it follows the grammatical rules from Dutch, and it uses partly the lexicon of SLN, and partly invented signs (Schermer Citation1991).
2. Mean level of hearing loss was calculated by dividing the hearing loss at 500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz derived from recent audiograms. From three low‐proficiently signing children there were no recent audiograms available. Yet, these children, who were educated in mainstream schools, were involved in a special‐language remediation programme and their remedial teachers confirmed they were profoundly deaf.
3. In a different project, we examined the development of evaluative expression in hearing writers of Dutch, and had collected written narratives in hearing 15–16‐year‐olds and adults using the same procedures as in the present paper. Analyses of the frequency of using evaluative devices in hearing 9–10, 11–12, 15–16‐year‐olds and adults showed that the use of evaluation in hearing writers increases with age, and is largest in hearing 15–16‐year‐olds. Comparison of the deaf proficiently signing children with the older groups of hearing writers showed that proficiently signing children perform at the same level of the hearing 15–16‐year‐olds.
4. To make sure that the pattern of evaluation in the hearing bilingual children cannot be explained by the fact that they were 2 years younger than the other comparison groups, we compared the hearing bilingual children with 20 age‐matched hearing monolingual children (mean age = 10;3 years (SD = 0.6 years), mean text length = 80.00 (SD = 47.10), MLU = 5.64 (SD = 0.96)), and with the 11–12‐year‐old monolingual children from this study. A one‐factor ANOVA on the use of evaluative devices showed no effect of group, indicating that hearing bilingual children did not differ from hearing age‐matched and 11–12‐year‐old monolingual children on the use of evaluative devices.