Hearing Loss and Deafness

Essays of deaf students frequently reveal patterns of ungrammatical English usage. Discrepancies that are similar to those of very young children developing normally include failure to invert subject and auxiliary when using a question, or omission of the verb "to be" (the copula) in a sentence. But deaf children often show other difficulties in mastering English syntax in their writing. For example, a ten-year-old wrote: "We perttey fun camp after home. The will week fun camp after car." An eighteen-year-old wrote: "A boy give to a dog eat the bread" (Quigley and King 1982, pp. 444-445).

Some of the distinct syntactic structures that deaf children generate involve a confusion between "have" and "be" ("Mama have sick") and an incorrect pairing of auxiliary with verb markers ("Mary has washing the dishes"). In using the passive voice, deaf children are likely to delete the word "by." They are also likely to delete conjunctions ("Eddie carried, dumped trash"). Question formation is difficult ("Who a girl bought you a doll?"). Relative pronouns may be deleted and substitutions made ("I patted the girl's arm was hurt").

In writing, deaf children's essays often overuse simple sentence structure. This may result from classroom drills to encourage the development of syntactic skills as well as spelling and punctuation rules. Reading materials, however, more commonly have advanced sentence structure; they require more mastery of complex sentences than are used in spoken conversations.