UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA FACULTY OF EDUCATION
EXPRESSIVE AND RECEPTIVE SEMANTIC SKILLS IN HEARING IMPAIRED CHILDREN
Doctoral thesis
Candidate Mentor
Teuta Ramadani Rasimi dr. Darija Skubic, asst. prof.
Co-menthor: dr. Martina Ozbič, asst. prof.
Ljubljana, 2020
To my children Dea and Dion, your love made me a better and stronger person,
the one to write this work.
Abstract
Language is a social component that can be developed only if we have a fertile environment that stimulates the cognitive inner potential of the child. Children with permanent hearing loss, due to lack of auditory input have a delayed language acquisition and development, both in production and in comprehension, respectively form, content and use of the language.
The aim of this dissertation is to research the level of comprehension and production of labels, categories, attributes, functions and definition, which enables to detect if there are differences among subjects with different mode of communication, degree of hearing loss and period of hearing loss. In order to realize this assessment, we administrated Test of Semantic Skills – Primary (TOSS) for receptive and expressive semantic skills on N=50 children aged 8 to 15 years old, attending residential school, using oral or sign language as a dominant mode of communication, with different degree of hearing loss (D/HH) and different period of hearing loss (pre-lingual or post-lingual).
Results gathered in this dissertation show significantly higher knowledge of receptive semantic skills compared with expressive semantic skills, respectively the areas of labels, categories and functions are easier for PCHI to comprehend than state. Subjects using sign language excelled both in receptive and expressive tasks, whereas subjects using oral mode of communication, and deaf subjects showed higher level of performance in both receptive and expressive tasks compared to hard of hearing subjects. The period of hearing loss played an important part only for receptive tasks in favour of pre-lingual HIC, but not in the expressive tasks. The variables considered in this dissertation appeared to be an important factor for developing higher level of receptive and expressive semantic skills, which indicates that early exposure to language input, especially sign language to toddlers with HI, will indicate higher performance in receptive and expressive language.
The findings are compared to existing literature and theory and are used to raise additional questions for further studies on language development. Recommendation and
implications for speech therapists, teachers as well as policy makers working with children with hearing impairments are provided as well.
Key words: hearing impairment, semantic skills, mode of communication, Toss-test primary
Table of content
ABSTRACT ... 4
TABLE OF CONTENT... 6
TABLE OF FIGURES ... 9
TABLE OF TABLES ... 9
TABLE OF CHARTS ... 12
TABLE OF HISTOGRAMS ... 15
ABBREVIATIONS... 16
ACRONYMES ... 16
CHAPTER I ... 1
1. INTRODUCTION ... 1
CHAPTER II ... 3
2. LITERATURE REVIEW ... 3
2.1 LANGUAGE STRUCTURE ... 3
2.1.1 Language form ... 5
2.1.2 Language content ... 14
2.1.3 Language pragmatics ... 17
2.1.4 Albanian language and its structure ... 19
2.2 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ... 23
2.2.1 Behavioural theory ... 23
2.2.2 Psycholinguistic theory- the syntactic model ... 26
2.2.3 Psycholinguistic theories: the semantic-cognitive model ... 30
2.2.4 Socio-interaction theory ... 34
2.3 LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT OF HEARING IMPARED CHILDREN ... 38
2.3.1 Factors that influence language development of hearing impaired children... 39
2.3.2 Language and cognition in deaf and hard of hearing ... 42
2.3.3 Language development and communication skills in hearing impaired children... 45
2.3.3.1 Mode of communication of D and HH children ... 53
2.4 RELEVANT INQUIRES ... 56
CHAPTER III ... 65
3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ... 65
3.1 RESEARCH SCOPE AND OBJECTIVE ... 65
3.2 DEFINING VARIABLES ... 67
3.3 INSTRUMENT AND TECHNIQUES ... 68
3.4.1 Administration and scoring the test ... 70
3.4.2 Adaptation and reliability of the instrument ... 71
3.4 ETHICAL CONSIDERATION ... 74
3.5 THE SAMPLE ... 74
3.6 LIMITATION OF THE RESEARCH... 78
CHAPTER IV ... 80
4. DATA PROCESSING AND RESULTS ... 80
4.1 INTRODUCTION ... 80
4.1.1 The results of the test between receptive and expressive tasks ... 82
4.1.2 Inter correlations between each criterion variables... 85
4.2 MODE OF COMMUNICATION FOR VARIABLE RECEPTIVE SEMANTIC SKILLS ... 90
4.2.1 Mode of communication in association with variable A-identifying labels ... 92
4.2.2 Mode of communication in association with variable B-identifying categories ... 94
4.2.3 Mode of communication in association with variable C-identifying attributes ... 95
4.2.4 Mode of communication in association with variable D-identifying functions ... 98
4.2.5 Mode of communication in association with variable C-identifying definitions ... 101
4.3 MODE OF COMMUNICATION FOR VARIABLE EXPRESSIVE SEMANTIC SKILLS ... 104
4.3.1 Mode of communication in association with variable F-stating labels ... 106
4.3.2 Mode of communication in association with variable G-stating categories ... 110
4.3.3. Mode of communication in association with variable H-stating attributes ... 111
4.3.4. Mode of communication in association with variable I-stating functions ... 115
4.3.5 Mode of communication in association with variable J-stating definitions ... 118
4.4 DEGREE OF HEARING LOSS FOR VARIABLE RECEPTIVE SEMANTIC SKILLS ... 122
4.4.1 Degree of hearing loss in association with variable A-identifying labels ... 123
4.4.2 Degree of hearing loss in association with variable B-identifying labels ... 125
4.4.3 Degree of hearing loss in association with variable C-identifying attributes ... 126
4.4.4 Degree of hearing loss in association with variable D-identifying functions ... 128
4.4.5 Degree of hearing loss in association with variable E-identifying definition ... 129
4.5 DEGREE OF HEARING LOSS FOR VARIABLE EXPRESSIVE SEMANTIC SKILLS ... 130
4.5.1 Degree of hearing loss in association with variable F-stating labels ... 132
4.5.2 Degree of hearing loss in association with variable B-stating categories ... 133
4.5.3 Degree of hearing loss in association with variable H-stating attributes ... 134
4.5.4 Degree of hearing loss in association with variable I-stating functions ... 135
4.5.5 Degree of hearing loss in association with variable J-stating definitions ... 137
4.6 PERIOD OF HEARING LOSS FOR VARIABLE RECEPTIVE SEMANTIC SKILLS ... 139
4.6.1 Period of hearing loss in association with variable A-identifying labels ... 140
4.6.2 Period of hearing loss in association with variable B-identifying categories ... 143
4.6.3 Period of hearing loss in association with variable C-identifying attributes ... 144
4.6.4 Period of hearing loss in association with variable D-identifying functions ... 147
4.6.5 Period of hearing loss in association with variable E-identifying definitions ... 148
4.7 PERIOD OF HEARING LOSS FOR VARIABLE RECEPTIVE SEMANTIC SKILLS ... 149
4.7.1 Period of hearing loss in association with variable F-stating labels ... 150
4.7.2 Period of hearing loss in association with variable G-stating categories ... 151
4.7.3 Period of hearing loss in association with variable H-stating attributes ... 153
4.7.4 Period of hearing loss in association with variable I-stating functions ... 155
4.7.5 Period of hearing loss in association with variable J-stating definitions ... 156
4.8 PREDICTOR POWER OF MAIN VARIABLES ... 158
4.8.1 Mode of communication as predictor variable ... 158
4.8.2 Degree of hearing loss as predictor variable ... 162
4.8.3 Period of hearing loss as predictor variable ... 164
CHAPTER V ... 168
5. DISCUSSION ... 168
5.1 DISCUSSION OVER THE DIFFERENCE OF MEAN BETWEEN PAIRED SAMPLE OF EACH FIELD OF RECEPTIVE AND EXPRESSIVE TASK, AND THEIR TOTAL SCORE... 168
5.2 DISCUSSION OVER INTER CORRELATION BETWEEN EACH ITEM AND THE TOTAL OF RECEPTIVE AND EXPRESSIVE SEMANTIC TASKS ... 171
5.3 DISCUSSION OF THE RESULTS REGARDING THE MAIN VARIABLE MODE OF COMMUNICATION 175 5.4 DISCUSSION OF THE RESULTS REGARDING THE MAIN VARIABLE DEGREE OF HEARING LOSS . 179 5.5 DISCUSSION OF THE RESULTS REGARDING THE MAIN VARIABLE PERIOD OF HEARING LOSS .. 180
5.6 DISCUSSION OVER PREDICTIVE POWER OF EACH VARIABLE ... 182
CHAPTER VI ... 184
6. CONCLUDING REMARKS AND FURTHER IMPLICATIONS ... 184
6.1 IMPLICATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH ... 187
6.2 IMPLICATIONS FOR PARENTS, SPECIAL EDUCATION TEACHERS, THERAPISTS ... 189
REFERENCES ... 191
APPENDIX ... 218
POVZETEK……….…223
Table of figures
Figure 2.1-1 Stokoes’ Symbols Used for Writing the Signs of ASL ... 8 Figure 2.1-2 Comparison of some signs in KSL and ASL ... 9 Figure 2.1-3 Examples of two signs with different meaning changed by sign markers ... 10 Figure 2.1-4 Example of sign with multiple meanings in ALSL ... 12 Figure 2.3-1 Babies natural hand shapes ... 47 Figure 2.3-2 Transformation of babies handshape to referent signs in deaf toddlers .... 48 Figure 2.3-3 Norwegian sign alphabet ... 48
Table of tables
Table 3.4-1 Reliability Coefficients for Receptive tasks ... 72 Table 3.4-2 Reliability Coefficients for Expressive semantic tasks ... 73 Table 3.6-3 Descriptive statistics according to the main variable mode of communication ... 76 Table 3.6-4 Descriptive statistic according to the main variable degree of hearing loss . 77 Table 3.6-5 Descriptive statistic according to the main variable period of hearing loss.. 77 Table 4.1-6 One Sample Kolmogorov Smirnov test for receptive items ... 80 Table 4.1-7 One Sample Kolmogorov Smirnov test for expressive items ... 81 Table 4.1-8 Descriptive statistics of the result for each receptive and expressive task, and their total ... 83 Table 4.1-9 Difference of mean between paired sample of each area of receptive and expressive task, and total of receptive and expressive ... 84 Table 4.1-10 Inter correlations between each item and the total of receptive and
expressive semantic tasks ... 86 Table 4.1-11 Differences between age of subjects and receptive tasks of semantic skills ... 88 Table 4.1-12 Difference between age of subjects and expressive tasks of semantic skills ... 89 Table 4.2-13 Descriptive statistics between subjects that use oral mode and sign
language as a mode of communication for receptive tasks of semantic skills ... 90 Table 4.2-14 Differences of arithmetic means between subjects that use oral mode and sign language for each area of receptive tasks ... 91
Table 4.2-15 Associations between subjects who use oral or sign mode of
communication with each task of the area identifying labels ... 92 Table 4.2-16 Association between subjects who use oral or sign mode of communication with each task of the area identifying categories... 95 Table 4.2-17 Association between subjects who use oral or sign mode of communication with each task of the area identifying attributes ... 96 Table 4.2-18 Association between subjects who use oral or sign mode of communication with each task of the area identifying functions ... 99 Table 4.2-19 Associations between subjects who use oral or sign mode of
communication with each task of the area identifying definitions ... 101 Table 4.3-20 Descriptive statistics between subjects that use oral mode and sign
language as a mode of communication for expressive tasks of semantic skills ... 104 Table 4.3-21 Differences of arithmetic means between subjects that use oral mode and sign language for each area of expressive tasks ... 105 Table 4.3-22 Association between subjects who use oral or sign mode of communication with each task of the area stating labels ... 106 Table 4.3-23 Association between subjects who use oral or sign mode of communication with each task of the area stating categories ... 110 Table 4.3-24 Association between subjects who use oral or sign mode of communication with each task of the area stating attributes ... 112 Table 4.3-25 Association between subjects who use oral or sign mode of communication with each task of the area stating functions ... 115 Table 4.3-26 Association between subjects who use oral or sign mode of communication with each task of the area stating definitions ... 118 Table 4.4-27 Descriptive statistics between subjects with different degree of hearing loss for receptive tasks of semantic skills ... 122 Table 4.4-28 Differences of arithmetic means between D and HH subjects for each area of receptive tasks ... 122 Table 4.4-29 Associations between D and HH subjects with each task of the area
identifying labels ... 124 Table 4.4-30 Association between D and HH subjects with each task of the area
identifying categories... 125 Table 4.4-31 Association between D and HH subjects with each task of the area
identifying attributes ... 127 Table 4.4-32 Association between D and HH subjects with each task of the area
identifying functions ... 129 Table 4.4-33 Association between D and HH subjects with each task of the area
identifying definitions ... 130
Table 4.5-34 Descriptive statistics between deaf D and Hard of hearing HH subjects for expressive ... 131 Table 4.5-35 Differences of arithmetic means between D and HH subjects for each area of expressive tasks ... 131 Table 4.5-36 Association between D and HH subjects with each task of the area stating labels ... 132 Table 4.5-37 Association between D and HH subjects with each task of the area stating categories ... 133 Table 4.5-38 Association between D and HH subjects with each task of the area stating attributes... 135 Table 4.5-39 Association between D and HH subjects with each task of the area stating functions ... 136 Table 4.5-40 Association between D and HH subjects with each task of the area stating definitions ... 138 Table 4.6-41 Differences between period of hearing loss subjects each task of the area identifying labels ... 139 Table 4.6-42 Differences of arithmetic means between pre-lingual and post-lingual subjects for each area of receptive tasks ... 140 Table 4.6-43 Association between period of hearing loss with each task of the area identifying labels ... 141 Table 4.6-44 Association between period of hearing loss with each task of the area identifying categories... 144 Table 4.6-45 Association between period of hearing loss with each task of the area identifying attributes ... 145 Table 4.6-46 Association between period of hearing loss with each task of the area identifying functions ... 147 Table 4.6-47 Association between period of hearing loss with each task of the area identifying definitions ... 148 Table 4.7-48 Association between period of hearing loss subjects each task of the area stating labels ... 149 Table 4.7-49 Differences of arithmetic means between pre-lingual and post-lingual subjects for each area of expressive tasks ... 149 Table 4.7-50 Association between period of hearing loss with each task of the area stating labels ... 150 Table 4.7-51 Association between period of hearing loss with each task of the area stating categories ... 152 Table 4.7-52 Association between period of hearing loss with each task of the area stating attributes ... 153
Table 4.7-53 Association between period of hearing loss with each task of the area stating functions ... 155 Table 4.7-54 Association between period of hearing loss with each task of the area stating definition ... 157 Table 4.8-55 Simple linear regression between mode of communication, and separately each item of receptive semantic skills, Identifying labels, identifying categories,
identifying attributes, identifying functions, identifying definitions ... 158 Table 4.8-56 Simple linear regression between mode of communication, and separately each item of receptive semantic skills, Stating labels, Stating categories, Stating
attributes, Stating functions, Stating definitions ... 160 Table 4.8-57 Simple linear regressions between level of hearing loss, and separately each item of receptive semantic skills, identifying labels, identifying categories,
identifying attributes, identifying functions, identifying definitions ... 162 Table 4.8-58 Simple linear regression between level of hearing loss, and separately each item of expressive semantic skills, Stating labels, Stating categories, Stating attributes, Stating functions, Stating definitions ... 163 Table 4.8-59 Simple linear regressions between period of hearing loss, and separately each item of receptive semantic skills, identifying labels, identifying categories,
identifying attributes, identifying functions, identifying definitions ... 165 Table 4.8-60 Simple linear regression between level of hearing loss, and separately each item of expressive semantic skills, Stating labels, Stating categories, Stating attributes, Stating functions, Stating definitions ... 166
Table of charts
Chart 4.2-1. Relation of mode of communication S/O with A-show me a machine? ... 93 Chart 4.2-2 Association of mode of communication S/O with A7- show me the mail carrier? ... 93 Chart 4.2-3 Association of mode of communication S/O with A9-show me a customer?94 Chart 4.2-4 Association of mode of communication S/O with C2- show me something that is woven? ... 97 Chart 4.2-5 Association of mode of communication S/O with C7- show me something with an address on it? ... 97 Chart 4.2-6 Association of mode of communication S/O with C2- show me something sharp? ... 98
Chart 4.2-7 Association of mode of communication S/O with D6- show me a machine that we use for communication? ... 100 Chart 4.2-8 Association of mode of communication S/O with D7- show me something that supports boards? ... 100 Chart 4.2-9 Association of mode of communication S/O with E1- I see the place on a boy’s body that protects his heart and lungs. Show It to me ... 102 Chart 4.2-10 Association of mode of communication signed/oral with E6- I see
something that circulates air. Show it to me. ... 103 Chart 4.2-11 Association of mode of communication S/O with E8- I see a metal container that holds mail, show it to me. ... 103 Chart 4.3-12 Relation of mode of communication S/O with F-what is this called- (for globe)? ... 107 Chart 4.3-13 Association of mode of communication S/O with F2- what is this called- grill barbeque? ... 108 Chart 4.3-14 Association of mode of communication S/O with F4- there are eggs in here.
What are the eggs in? ... 108 Chart 4.3-15 Association of mode of communication S/O with F7- what is this called- (couch)? ... 109 Chart 4.3-16 Association of mode of communication S/O with F8- what is this called- (stapler) ... 109 Chart 4.3-17 Association of mode of communication S/O with G10- what are these called? Bowl, plate? ... 111 Chart 4.3-18 Relation of mode of communication S/O with H1- what is his skeleton made of? ... 113 Chart 4.3-19 Association of mode of communication S/O with H4- what are grocery bags made of? ... 113 Chart 4.3-20 Association of mode of communication S/O with H7- tell me two parts of a lawn mower. ... 114 Chart 4.3-21 Association of mode of communication S/O with H9- how does pepper taste?... 114 Chart 4.3-22 Association of mode of communication S/O with I4- what do we do with a scale? ... 116 Chart 4.3-23 Association of mode of communication S/O with I8- the principal made an announcement. What is an announcement for? ... 117 Chart 4.3-24 Association of mode of communication S/O with I10- What is a mop for?
... 117 Chart 4.3-25 Association of mode of communication S/O with J1-these children are healthy. Tell me what healthy mean? ... 119
Chart 4.3-26 Association of mode of communication S/O with J2- this book has an author. What is an author? ... 120 Chart 4.3-27 Association of mode of communication S/O with J5- the toaster is on the counter. Tell me what a toaster is? ... 120 Chart 4.3-28 Association of mode of communication S/O with J9- some toys are put away. Tell me what does put away mean? ... 121 Chart 4.4-29 Association of degree of hearing loss D/HH with B5- show me an appliance?
... 126 Chart 4.4-30 Association of degree of hearing loss D/HH with C2- show me something that is woven? ... 128 Chart 4.5-31 Association of degree of hearing loss D/HH with G9- what are these called?
Sweeping, washing, dusting? ... 134 Chart 4.5-32 Association of degree of hearing loss D/HH with I9-what does a mail carrier do? ... 137 Chart 4.5-33 Association of degree of hearing loss D/HH with I11- what do her lungs help her to do? ... 137 Chart 4.6-34 Association of period of hearing loss SPR/SPO /with A3- show me a
mechanic? ... 142 Chart 4.6-35 Association of period of hearing loss SPO/SPR with A9- show me a
customer? ... 142 Chart 4.6-36 Association of period of hearing loss SPO/SPR with A10- show me an x-ray?
... 143 Chart 4.6-37 Association of period of hearing loss Pr/Ps with C7- show me something with an address on it? ... 145 Chart 4.7-38 Association of period of hearing loss SPR/SPO with F7- what is this called- couch? ... 151 Chart 4.7-39 Association of period of hearing loss Pr/Ps with H4- what are grocery bags made of? ... 154 Chart 4.7-40 Association of period of hearing loss SPR/SPO with H9- how does pepper taste?... 154 Chart 4.7-41 Association of period of hearing loss SPR/SPO with I4- what do we do with a scale? ... 156 Chart 4.7-42 Association of period of hearing loss SPR/SPO with J5- the toaster is on the counter. Tell me what a toaster is? ... 157
Table of histograms
Histogram 4.8-1 Distribution of residuals for mode of communication variable as
predictor variable to identifying labels ... 159 Histogram 4.8-2 Distribution of residuals for mode of communication variable as
predictor variable to identifying definitions ... 159 Histogram 4.8-3 Distribution of residuals for mode of communication variable as
predictor variable to stating labels ... 160 Histogram 4.8-4 Distribution of residuals for mode of communication variable as
predictor variable to stating attributes ... 161 Histogram 4.8-5 Distribution of residuals for mode of communication variable as
predictor variable to stating functions ... 161 Histogram 4.8-6 Distribution of residuals for mode of communication variable as
predictor variable to stating definitions ... 162 Histogram 4.8-7 Distribution of residuals for degree of hearing loss variable as predictor variable to stating categories ... 163 Histogram 4.8-8 Distribution of residuals for degree of hearing loss variable as predictor variable to stating functions ... 164 Histogram 4.8-9 Distribution of residuals for period of hearing loss variable as predictor variable to identifying labels ... 165 Histogram 4.8-10 Distribution of residuals for period of hearing loss variable as predictor variable to stating attributes ... 166 Histogram 4.8-11 Distribution of residuals for period of hearing loss variable as predictor variable to stating functions ... 167
ABBREVIATIONS
SS – subjects with sign mode of communication SO – subjects with oral mode of communication D – deaf subjects
HH – hard of hearing subjects
SPR – subjects with pre-lingual hearing loss SPO – subjects with post-lingual hearing loss LAD – Language Acquisition Device
ZPD – Zone of Proximal Development PCHI – permanent child hearing loss HC – hearing children
CDP – children with deaf parents CHP – children with hearing parents
ACRONYMES
ASL – American Sign Language
UNHS – Universal Newborn Hearing Screening ALSL – Albanian Sign Language
KSL – Kosovo Sign Language BSL – British Sign Language
ASLVT – American Sign Language Vocabulary Test
1
Chapter I
1. INTRODUCTION
Hearing impairment in Kosovo and Albania is a disability that counts as one of the latest diagnosed disabilities, which in consequence causes delayed language development in hearing impaired children (Basha, 2013). There are no data in Albanian context to support the statement above (regarding the language development), hence no investigation was carried out to test their language abilities, however if we refer to their enrolment on high educational institutions, the data are discouraging, very few of them or none at all are enrolled in any of the existing faculties (Landsman & Moloku-Berdyna, 2009). It is very well established that even a small language development affects the overall academic achievement of any child, which is why we were intrigued to investigate the level of language development in hearing impaired children attending residential schools in Kosovo and Albania, where Albanian language is the official standardized spoken and written language.
This dissertation has been organized in five main chapters preceded by an introduction: the introduction of the dissertation includes the definition of the problem that is being studied and a brief description of every chapter included in this dissertation.
The second chapter presents an analysis of the literature related to the main variables of the study. The analysis of the existing literature aimed in summarizing linguistic development theories and factors that affect language development, respectively semantic skills in hearing impaired children. Every theory and operationalized variable has been treated with examples of studies from foreign countries, and in the absence of similar studies conducted in the Albanian context of the Albanian language, comparisons and analysis have been made with studies developed in foreign languages or sign languages.
The third chapter describes the methodology used for the realization of this study.
It begins with an introduction and presentation of the purpose and objectives of the
2 study. Based on the purpose and objectives of the study, the relevant research questions of this study have been raised. Subsequently, the operational variables are described and the design of the research is presented. Also, this chapter explains the details of the test procedures followed to implement this design, as well as the sample selection method that is tailored to the design type of the study. The instruments used, their preparation and the data collection procedure are further presented. Finally, in this chapter we present the reliability and ethical aspects of research, altogether with the limitations of the research.
The fourth chapter presents the findings of the study. In this chapter, a full description of all the demographic variables of the participants of the study is provided.
Also, the results of measuring reliability of variables, the distribution of variables and their correlated relationships, the inferential statistical analysis, the variability of the results from comparing variable, altogether with prediction power of each variable, enable a solid base for the next chapter to be discussed.
The fifth chapter includes discussion and analysis of the study results. In this chapter, the findings of the study are discussed in more detail, accompanied by comments on the understanding of the impact these findings have in the Albanian context. Further, comparisons with previous study data, as mentioned above, are in the context of English.
This chapter also clarifies the attitude of the researcher to the phenomenon based on the findings of the study.
The sixth chapter presents the main conclusions of this study, obtained from the results and discussions about them. Further, these summarized conclusions will serve to write some recommendations for improving the actual situation or for further study. In this chapter, the researcher has also provided suggestions for other interested researchers who may have a similar interest in studying the language development of hearing impaired children and some recommendations for improving language development of hearing impaired children for speech therapists, teachers and parents.
At the end of this dissertation, references are presented in alphabetical order, and attachments like instruments, study permission are provided as well.
3
Chapter II
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 LANGUAGE STRUCTURE
Language, the hallmark of humanity, can be defined as an organized system of arbitrary signals and rule-governed structures that are used as a means for communication (Brandone, Salkind, Golinkoff, & Pasek, 2006). The speaker of a certain language must have the ability to create and use signs, that is, a symbolic affiliation which includes and accepts the rules for the use of the characters. It is historically seen as the first landmark that has accompanied the human being from his birth. As such, it is very dynamic, even though the words are static, but the meaning of the words is dynamic and has levels. There has long been a dispute whether the language is an innate ability of a human being that needs to be cherished by the environment in order to develop, in other words, whether it is biological or social. This comparison, as one fragment of his paper has been argued by Naoki Araki (2015), comparing the thoughts of two major linguists of 20th century, de Saussure and Chomsky. De Saussure, according to Araki, has made a distinction between speech (parole) and language (langue) that led him to the conclusion that language is a social fact for de Saussure, because speech is momentary and individual to him, whereas language is collective, and it can only be changed if it has collective approval. On the other side, Chomsky considers language to be a mental state and a representation of mind/brain (Araki, 2015), which makes the language a physical part of any individual, even though there are no people around him, while Saussure is determined in his thoughts that the language exists despite the individuals’ will and it is learned (Araki, 2015). The theory that the language is a biological trait has been supported in a manner also by Locke (2010), who has analysed the results of many authors (Senghas
& Coppola, 2001; Senghas, Kita, & Ozuryek, 2004) about deaf children and how they are able to reconstruct sign languages that have been awkwardly modelled by their non- natively signing parents, and came to the conclusion that if part of the language known
4 to these individuals originated outside their heads, then the rest must have come from the inside. Even though in their books, De Saussure (1959), has argued about the importance of signs in language, and Chomsky (1988) about the internalized rules of language, according to Araki (2015) they both agree that the essence of a language is the language rules which an individual must respect to properly use the language. So, speech is a language in use, and the language itself is a social creation.
Even though language is known to be a natural part of everyday communication between human beings as a result of their need, it can be considered also as non- instinctive, because a child has to learn the language of his society (Sapir, 1921). It is also known as arbitrary, because as Sapir (1921) said language is not inherited, the relation between the word and its meaning is learned, and this arbitrariness leads to a variety of languages, which develop the human brain, because there is no inherent reason to call an object “table” (English) or “tavolina” (Albanian). This is what makes all the languages equally complex, capable of expressing a wide range of ideas, and expandable to include a new word for new concepts. Language is an open-ended matter, that enables speakers through communication to create an infinite number of thoughts, words, sentences, (Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 2004), whereas the sound of speech is only the instrument of thought, a speech has no existence by itself (de Saussure, 1959). However, according to Tomasello (2003), the human species are the only human beings that are conditioned to communicate effectively only if they have been raised in the same linguistic community, unlike the non-human species that can communicate without combining communicatively significant elements to create new meanings.
Language consists of three major components: form, content and use (Bloom & Lahey, 1978). The first component refers to the linguistic elements that connect sounds and symbols with a meaning (Scheetz, 2012), and it includes: phonology, morphology and syntax. The second component, the content refers to the component of the language that provides us with information about objects, events, people and the relationships among them known as semantics (Scheetz, 2012), and it depends on how one’s own language community labels word content in the world (Brandone, Salkind, Golinkoff, & Pasek,
5 2006). The third component dictates how language is used in a variety of social contexts, or pragmatics. For the need of this thesis, we are going to briefly present the typical development of each aspect of the language.
2.1.1 Language form
Phonology, morphology and syntax are the units of a language that connect symbols to a meaning, regardless whether they are iconically represented or by sound (Bloom &
Lahey, 1978). Each of these units have a different role in language functioning, however their importance is evident only when they are in correlation with each other. Starting with phonology, a part of a language that is defined as historical study of sounds, or the study of the functioning of sounds in a particular language (de Saussure, 1959), enables to distinguish the difference between languages, hence every language differs by the numbers of phonemes, sounds and rules. However, linguists have distinguished phonetics from phonology, starting with Trubetzkoy (1969), who underlines phonetics as a science of speech, while phonology is considered to be dedicated to language, which in parallel is compatible with de Saussure’s view (1959), who puts parole as part of phonetics, while langue as part of phonology. There has been a long dispute over their resemblance and differences of phonetics and phonology (Foley, 1977; Fudge, 1967; Woohyeok, 2012;
Hjelmlev, 1953), because of the common interest that they share in the sounds of all human languages (Woohyeok, 2012), since phonetics deals with production, transmission and reception of speech sounds, phonology encompasses selection, organization and functional classification of sounds in a particular language.
Nevertheless, their differences are not strict (Rokaj, 2005), and there is no interface between phonetics and phonology with the fully autonomous nature of them (Woohyeok, 2012), because if phonetics represents the modules how a sound is created, and phonology deals with its function, neither phonology can exist without its material side (the creation of a sound), nor phonetic would have its importance without the function of the sound (Rokaj, 2005).
6 In Albanian language, for instance, if we take a word like bebe, which means a baby, and it is pronounced [bébe], for phoneticians the two b are not the same, because the second b losses its sound with the second vowel e, while for phonologists this is not a matter of importance, what is important is the second b not to lose its intensity and become silent, like p, and then the word loses its meaning. To have a clearer picture of this difference, the author Rokaj (2005), gives an example of the word bark/park, where the first one means stomach, while the second means park, and this is just an example of how a word changes its meaning but is still in Albanian language, while the next time it changes, it might not be recognizable in that language (Pribanić, 1998).
So, it is the phoneme that is the main interest of phonology, and even though it has been studied for the first time by De Saussure (1959), the linguists from the School of Prague (Trubetzkoy, 1969; Jackobson, 1962), emphasized the main features of phonemes not only from speaking perspective, but also from acoustic perspective (Robins, 1997) while it undergoes changes, that according to Bloomfield (1984) those changes are a consequence of many factors, like bilingualism, different dialects etc. According to Bernstein & Tiegerman-Farber (2009), two rules govern phoneme use. The first one is the distributional rule, which describes how a sound can be placed in various word positions, and the second is the sequencing rule, which dictates which sounds can be used together within the same syllable, to create a morpheme, the smallest unit of a word (Valli, Lucas, Mulrooney, & Rankin, 2000). When we refer to phonetic development of a child, the first contact of typically developing children with a sound originates in the womb (Golinkoff &
Hirsh-Pasek, 1999), which means that the growing fetus can hear a number of sounds, with low and medium frequency, prosody and rhythm generated both inside and outside mothers’ abdomen, so this period they are already familiar with some of the phonology of their language (Brandone, Salkind, Golinkoff, & Pasek, 2006). As a result of these experiences, infants at birth are already familiar with some of the phonology of their language, including its intonational patterns and prosodic contours (Brandone, Salkind, Golinkoff, & Pasek, 2006).
7 So, if phonology is defined as a sound system of the language, and sign language has no sounds, the definition of Brentari (1998) for sign language phonology: “as the level of grammatical analysis where primitive structural units “without meaning” are combined to create an infinite number of meaningful utterances” sheds a light on its existence in sign language. However, his definition has been disputed by Edward (2012), who explains that Brentari’s definition refers only to “the parts of the body and the face (where we sign), does not always give a clue to the meaning of the sign, which is true for arbitrary signs but not for ironically motivated signs where the place, the movement, the shape of the hand and the orientation sometimes indicate the meaning of the sign”. Consequently, it can be said that signs are composed of minimal units such as manuals (shapes, locations, and movements of the hands), non-manuals (facial expressions, head, and body postures), and the space in front of the signer, all of which contribute to sign language phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse (Arik, 2013). In American Sign Language, the analogues of phonemes were called “cheremes” from Greek cheir hand (cf.chiro) + - eme; coined by U.S. linguist William Stokoe (Pribanić, 1998; Crasborn, van der Hulst, &
van de Kooji, 2000), and among the first pioneers who gave the first system of notation William Stokoe in his book A dictionary of American Sign Language on linguistics principles (1965), where he presented the first attempt to describe the similarities and differences between signs and phonemes, even though later was noticed that even the use of two hands (as phonological marker) versus one hand changes the meaning of the word (Crasborn, 2011).
William Stokoe had a huge impact on developing the science on sign language by providing an example of analysis of a sign, with tab symbols (see below) that explain place of articulation, dez symbols that describe the hand configuration and sig symbols that describe the action or the movement, even though it was slightly changed by Lynn Friedmann (1977) because she thought that Stokoe’s description and phonemicization were inadequate to fully explore the parameters of sign language, or Hamburg Notation System for Sign Languages which includes approximately 210 characters of symbol
8 inventory based on handshape, orientation , location and action of the sign (Hanke, 2004).
Some of the symbols were as follows:
Figure 2.1-1 Stokoe’s Symbols Used for Writing the Signs of ASL
(Kato, 2008)
Even though this notation has been reanalysed by other authors like Paul and Quigley (1994), new generation of authors like Mihoko Kato (2008) consider it as rather impractical for general users because they are too technical, much like phonetic alphabets in spoken languages, so different researchers have continued to analyse more specific markers, like the role play of the fingers for instance (Ormel, Crasborn, & Jann Koostra, 2017). However, like many other languages, ASL also encompasses “prosodic” elements known as intonational elements (including fascial expression and head positions) (Sandler W. , 2010), and part of these elements were also analysed by Adelina Haskaj (2013) for Albanian Sign Language and Kosovo Sign Language, that have one thing in common, the same Albanian written and spoken standardized language. In the sample below is presented a phonological comparison between the signs according to Stokoe’s notation system:
9 Figure 2.1-2 Comparison of some signs in KSL and ASL
Book
Place of articulation: in front of the stomach Hand configuration: b form of the hand
Movement: one hand is passive, the other active
(Haskaj, 2013)
Place of articulation: in front of the stomach Shape of the hand: open both hands
Movement: hands move from outside the neutral zone to inside in front of the chest
(Haskaj, 2013)
As children learn the form of the language, they spontaneously learn the rules that govern the language formation, that is morphology and syntax (Schrimer, 2000). Even though each part of the language forms is simultaneously connected to each other, it is important to emphasize the role that they play in language learning. The name itself originates from Greek, “morph” meaning “shape, form”, and depending on what kind of form we are referring to, like in our case in linguistics view, then we can say that morphology as a science refers to a mental system involved in word formation, subsequently it is a branch of linguistics that deals with words, their internal structure and how they are formed (Aronoff & Fudeman, 2011). Valli & Lucas (2000) define morpheme as the smallest unit of a word, while morphology as a study that examines the smallest linguistic units that have meaning or grammatical function (Scheetz, 2012).
Morphemes in Albanian language, like in other languages, can consist of a word that is the root of the word (like pun, bukur), and a prefix or a suffix that cannot function alone (pun-oj, z-bukur-oj) (Rokaj, 2005; Aronoff & Fudeman, 2011). In addition, in morphology there is a morphological analysis and synthesis, however according to linguists (Aronoff & Fudeman, 2011), no matter which language we are looking at, we need analytic methods that will be independent of the structures we are examining;
preconceived notions might interfere with an objective, scientific analysis. This is
10 especially true when dealing with unfamiliar languages, like in the current thesis with Albanian and Kosovo Sign Languages, even though they are not standardized languages.
In standardized languages, like American Sign Language, by using comparative morphological analysis for English and ASL, Fernald and Napoli (Fernald & Jo Napoli, 2000) underlined the importance of sign markers as a prefix or suffix of a word, or even change the entire word, like in the case of the sign “bird” and “duck”. The same rules, even though they are not scientifically studied in the Albanian Sign Language and Kosovo Sign Language can be easily traced with a simple division of two or more signs that change the meaning only by changing the location, or handshape (Toprlak & Cakaj, 2012).
Figure 2.1-3 Examples of two signs with different meaning changed by sign markers
(Fernald & Jo Napoli, 2000)
So, even though sign languages can undergo the morphological analysis, we cannot see them as signed form of a spoken language, since many parts of are unrelated to spoken language, like for example Auslan (Australian Sign Language) with English. In these two languages, the concept of plural is created differently, by adding –s in English Language, and by repeating the movement in Auslan. (Johnston & Schembri, 2007)
Continuing with the third component of language form, syntax, many times correlated as morphosyntax, since it is very difficult for one to function without the other (Rokaj, 2005), and it is very closely related to the American structuralism linguists, especially of the first half of the twentieth century, because they were often dealing with languages that they had never encountered before (Aronoff & Fudeman, 2011). The word súntaxis originates from Greek language, first described by Greek linguist Apollonius Dyscolus in his Per. Suntáxeōs [On Syntax], and literally means ‘the act of placing together’
and thus occurs in different senses, such as ‘composition’, ‘arrangement’, ‘organisation’,
11
‘covenant’, ‘treatise’ and even ‘state constitution’ (Sauren, 2015), and in linguistic it means a system by which words are put together in any language to convey meaning. The fashionable view, in which syntax is defined as the formulation of rules to generate
“acceptable” (grammatically well-formed) sentences in any language, has been disputed and dismissed by some authors (Allot, 1995), because they consider that this kind of definition undervalues the importance of meaning in languages and overvalues the grammatical form, and this separates language from its biological and psychological function (Allot, 1995). Furthermore, the structuralist was among the first (Sapir, 1921;
Bloomfield, 1984) who were desperately trying to get a clear notion of syntactic facts (Sauren, 2015), and were among the first that clarified how a sentence is created, and that can be analysed only if they split it in two parts:
“In the primary division of an experience into two parts, the one focused is called the subject and the one left for later attention the predicate; the relation between them is called predication. If, after this first division, either subject or predicate or both receive further analysis, the elements in each case first singled out are again called subjects and the elements in relation to them, attributes. The subject is always the present thing, the known thing, or the concrete thing, the predicate or attribute, its quality, action, or relation or the thing to which it is like. Thus, in the sentence Lean horses run fast the subject is lean horses and the horses’ action, run fast, is the predicate. Within the subject there is the further analysis into the subject horses and its attribute lean, expressing the horses’ quality. In the predicate, fast is an attribute of the subject run.” (Bloomfield, 1984)
In a similar way, Albanian linguists analyse the sentence in the Albanian language, and precisely the syntactic rules are the ones that enable to create a syntactic relation between sentence unit, which means not just putting together the words, but respecting the depending relation among them (Rokaj, 2005), by creating a synthesis of words participants with a final product, a sentence or a thought (Aronoff & Fudeman, 2011). A brief description of the structure of the Albanian language is given in chapter 2.1.4.
Different relations such as, featured, quantitative, time, place, directional, reason, purpose, result, fully, gender-typed and other type of meaning relations exist between subjects and occasions (Aliyeva, 2014), which enable to create a meaningful thought or idea. In addition, the above-mentioned linguists and other linguists struggled to define the sentence as a grammatical concept (Sauren, 2015), starting with Bloomfield (1984)
12 who defines the sentence as a linguistic product that has internal structure in terms of layered hierarchy of constituents, to Chomksy (1957, 2002) according to whom a grammatical sentence means a sentence that is intuitively “acceptable to a native speaker”. Regardless of the definitions, when it comes to define how a child acquires these two parts of language, morphology and syntax, or the language form in general, it has been explained and investigated by many authors (Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek, 1999;
Brandone, Salkind, Golinkoff, & Pasek, 2006; Kuhl, 2004; Maguire, et al., 2010), eventually concluding that the language form occurs when the child discovers that rule-based combinations of a word actually express more than the meaning of any of individual words.
Regarding sign language, syntax is an inevitable part of its grammar, furthermore the parameters described above from Stokoe (1965) and Friedmann (1977), based on inquiries on sign language units like handshape, movement and location (Crasborn, van der Hulst, & van de Kooji, 2000; Brentari, 1998; Liddell & Johnson, 1989; Crasborn, 2011), can be seen analogous to phonological features like manner and place of articulation in the sub-lexical structure of spoken language (Hall, Ferreira, & Mayberry, 2015). A rich description of similarities of syntactic structure of sign language and spoken are shown in many investigations (Neidle, Kegl, MacLaughlin, & Lee, 2000; Sandler & Lillo-Martin, 2006;
Sulton-Spence & Woll, 1999) for hierarchical phrase structure, constituent order, movement operations, anaphora, embedding analogues to facial marking for topics and interrogatives, spatial marking for verb agreement. Even though the researchers have found familiarities between the sound language and the sign language, the difference between them remains enormous (Hall, Ferreira, & Mayberry, 2015), and it is related to the use of sign languages of visual space, which makes possible spatial mapping of objects and places in narrative for clarity of reference much easier than spoken language, or speed of articulation of the signs compared to the spoken word, where there is a need in slowing down the muscles activity of the body in sign language compared to the sound articulated by the vocal muscles (Swisher, 1988).
13 In addition, many examples can be found between ASL and English Language (Lidell, 2003), like the multiple meaning of a word in English Language for example. If indeed ASL is a signed form of English Language, then that word would be presented with just one sign in ASL, furthermore we have a sentence presented in sign language only with one sign that delivers a message, while in English language more than one word is needed to deliver the same message (Jachova & Karovska Ristovska, 2008). It is the same situation in ALSL and KSL with the Albanian language, so we analysed the signs in picture no.1 that have multiple meanings.
Figure 2.1-4 Example of sign with multiple meanings in ALSL
1. Brother/ sister 2. Close relative 3. Brother in law
4. Girlfriend/ boy friend (Çabej, 2005)
14 The above sentence is one of the many examples that can be found in Albanian Sign Language Dictionary (Çabej, 2005), which only confirms the theories of previous authors like Zora Jachovas’
and Aleksendras’ (2008), that Albanian and Kosovo Sign Language is not a signed form of Albanian written and spoken language. However, the grammatical aspect of sign languages, despite the enormous number of investigation conducted in the area, it still remains specific in its linguistic context.
2.1.2 Language content
The second part of language is the content, the name itself refers to the substance of something, and in linguistics it is called semantics. For the first has been stressed in Locke’s argument: “Words, in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the Ideas in the mind of him that uses them, how imperfectly so ever, or carelessly those Ideas are collected from the things, which they are supposed to represent” (Locke, 1824). Semantics as the science of meaning started to develop in 1883 when Michel Breal appeared with his “Les lois intellectuelles du langage. Fragment de sémantique” (Breal, 1883/1991), and used for the first time the term semantics, defining semantics as a science that studies the “intellectual laws of language change”. After him, the one who left hallmark on linguistic, a representative of structural semantics, de Saussure (1959) tried to explain the difference between the meaning of the word and its “value”. Till this period all the definitions and explanation referred to the development of the meaning of the word, later known as “Historical Semantics” (Fritz, 2012), which brought the lexicon into the formal study of grammar and, in doing so, revolutionized the discipline (Geeraerts, 2010). After introducing semantics as a concept, there have been other terms used for the same concept as semantics, like semasiology, semiology, semiotics and semics. However, this conflict of similar terminology continued till 1960s with the appearance of the work of Ullman (1962), Kronasser (1952) and others, that made some distinctions. Here I would quote the following definition introduced by Katz (1972) “Semantics is the study of
15 meaning that is concerned with what sentences and other linguistics objects express, not with the arrangement of their syntactic parts or their pronunciation”, or Palmer’s (1976): “Semantics is the technical term used to refer to the study of meaning”. As can be seen, each of these definitions incorporate the word meaning, however it is not just the meaning of the word that they are referring to, but also the meaning of phrases and sentences (Suwandi, 2011), regardless of the mode of delivery spoken, written or signed (Wagner, 2010). Even though the interest of the study of this thesis is the linguistic semantics, it cannot be strictly divided with philosophical semantics because the latter is concentrated on studying the relation between language expression and a person, thing or event to which the language expression refers to (Suwandi, 2011)
So, it is the concept – a knowledge that is formed from perceptual and action experience of an individual (Prarthana & Prema, 2012) – of the word or sentence that delivers the meaning, and the meaning can be defined as the breadth of information that carries a linguistic message (Rokaj, 2005). According to Gabriella et al. (Vigliocco, Meteyard, Andrews, & Kousta, 2009), there are two major types of information from which we learn word meanings, the experiential information derived both from our sensory-motor interaction with the outside world, and the language based information that is derived from the general linguistic contexts in which words appear.
Every language contains thousands of vocabulary items that refer to concepts ranging from the concrete and frequent (bottle, ball) to the abstract and unusual (ponder, perplex), and the primary challenge for acquiring word meanings is the reference, or how symbolic elements such as word forms are linked to specific-concepts (Wagner, 2010). Saksida (2014) has divided the literature into four broad areas that correspond to the infants’ words learning: 1) the development of native language categorization, 2) the development of categorization of the visual input and its possible interaction with language, 3) segmentation of words from fluent speech, and 4) acquiring the meaning of words – conceptual mapping between the word form and the concept for which it stands. Semantic development expands from the concrete nouns of infancy to complex, abstract, and relational concepts, such as words for actions, emotions, and
16 colours; and deictic terms, such as, this, and that that point to the time, places or situation (Brandone, Salkind, Golinkoff, & Pasek, 2006). According to Gabriela et al. (Vigliocco, Meteyard, Andrews, & Kousta, 2009) representation of abstract concepts in the mind/brain is grounded in the representation of concrete knowledge, which in turn is grounded in our sensory and motor experience of the world. This is why it is important that the child be in discourse with a competent adult speaker or signer (it doesn’t matter) to link the signifie’ with significant (de Saussure, 1959), so the child will understand their meaning, and be able to reproduce them. Thus, we have the symbol the concept and the referent. For instance, in Albanian Language the word zjarr (fire) is the symbol, the concept (meaning) changes depending on the individual experience to link with a concrete or abstract referent, or the linguistic context of the sentence, and as result it has several meanings:
1. Burning wood or coal: (lights the fire, around the fire, starts a fire) 2. Temperature: (there is high level of body heat)
3. Emptying a weapon: (fire, firearm) 4. Flame: (straw fire)
5. Powerful feeling: (speaks with fire, loves with fire) (Dhima, 2015)
It is important for each language component to be developed in its natural line with no regression as a precondition for further communication skills. In most cases researchers had less difficulties to create appropriate test to evaluate phonological, syntactical skills for children with hearing impairments, however albeit semantic skills are very closely related with the first two, evaluating receptive and expressive semantic skills was usually limited to just naming or identifying single written or shown words. In sign language, the sign is the symbol, which can be very much iconic to the concrete object or a function (referent), and it is easy for children with hearing impairment to understand them since they have to put less effort to learn them, unlike abstract words, which are in great per cent less iconic and harder to understand their meanings.
In addition, even though semantic skills can be evaluated based on the features of relationships between the symbols, like synonyms (different words with the same meaning), like shikoj (looking), vështroj (watching), hedh një sy (to look at) all have the similar meaning of looking at,
17 or antonyms, different words that have the opposite meaning of two occurrences, like i riu (young) and i vjetër (old), or homonyms, words that are exactly the same in the written form, however they can have totally different meaning based on the linguistics context in which they are used, for instance akrepi (hands of the clock, or a scorpion), or bari (grass/ shepherd) etc.
(Dhima, 2015), it is very important for hearing impaired children not to be constrained in these relations, because researchers (Koulidobrova & Davidson, in press) have shown that children are limited only on linguistic closed answers, without giving them space to understand or express the meaning in terms of utterance of words or signs. Receptive language skills involve receiving and decoding or interpreting language, while expressive language skills encompass encoding or production of language (Mcintyre, Hellsten, Didonde, Boden, & Doi, 2017).
By measuring their receptive (comprehension) and expressive (production) skills of the word, sentence meaning in everyday context, we can evaluate the level of the child’s language development (Rahimpur, 2004). So, if a sign language is considered as a natural way of communication equal to spoken language (Marscharck & Hauser, How deaf children learn, 2012), and every hearing child reaches the stage of semantics acquisition at the age of 5, then we will come to a conclusion that the same occurs in deaf children who use signed language from birth (Ramirez, Lieberman, & Mayberry, 2013). However, there are many factors that influence the variability of language acquisition between hearing impaired children (Ekmekci, 1991; Brandone, Salkind, Golinkoff, & Pasek, 2006), that result with a variability of different stages of language development, and among the first is the lack of hearing.
2.1.3 Language pragmatics
Owens (2012) defines pragmatics as the study of language in context and concentrates on language as a communication tool that is used to achieve social ends, therefore we can agree that children learn to communicate long before they develop the form and content of language through a combination of eye gaze, vocalization and gesture (Brandone, Salkind, Golinkoff, &
Pasek, 2006). To develop successful pragmatic skills there are many circumstances that need to be fulfilled, like involving appropriate people and circumstances, be completely and correctly
18 executed by all participants, and contain the appropriate intentions of all participants (Owens, 2012). In addition, pragmatics is closely related to semantic, since it reflects on the intent of the content of words (Dhima, 2015), however pragmatics deals more with speaker meaning (which refers to the goal that the speaker has when they produce the sentence), then the literal meaning of semantics concepts (Woensdregt, 2017).
Furthermore, it observes the rules that speakers must follow as they initiate and maintain a dialogue, and how they learn to make appropriate comments when they start conversing with others (Scheetz, 2012). According to Grice, the conversation is guided by the "principle of interaction". Participants in a conversation interact with one another. The four maxims of the principle of interaction are related to quantity, quality, relevance and manner. The term quantity means giving information as much as it is necessary. No participant should provide more or less information. The quality of each contribution should be guided by truthfulness and based on sufficient evidence. Participants should not say what they think is false and that for which they lack adequate evidence. The maximum of relevance indicates that a contribution should belong to the issue of conversation, to make it relevant.
Finally, each participant must be direct, not protracted, and avoid ambiguity (Lloshi, 2012).
To do all these, from both the speaker’s and listener’s point of view, it requires reasoning about other people’s minds, which according to Marienke (Woensdregt, 2017) is a cognitive capacity that is uniquely developed in humans compared to other animals, and it is not just a matter of linguistic competence, it is a matter of pragmatic competence. Adults are role models to pragmatic competence, they provide children with extensive pragmatic information about language use, by offering conventional terms for objects, properties, relations and activities, or even how an unfamiliar term differs from and is related to other words in the same domain (Clark E. , 2004).
The first studies on pragmatics where mainly concentrated on adults’ speakers, however it was necessary to analyse the language use on children (Pribanić, 1998), since children already know very much about how to use language at the age of 6, by observing conventionality and contrast, and readily making inferences from what others do (and don’t say) (Clark, 2004).
19 Furthermore, Rosalinda Baca and Christine Yoshinaga-Itano (2012) besides giving an extensive review of literature on pragmatic skills of children with hearing loss, in their present study they used the Pragmatic checklist, to assess the successfulness of language use of children with hearing loss compared to hearing children, and came to conclusion that those with hearing loss lack behind than hearing peers when demonstrating skills with complex language. However, there is little a small number of data that have assessed the pragmatics of sign language users.
2.1.4 Albanian language and its structure
Albanian (/ælˈbeɪniən/; shqip [ʃcip] or gjuha shqipe [ɟuhaʃcipɛ]) is part of Indo-European language family; but it has a special place in it. The Indo-European character of the language was first recognized in 1854 by the German linguist Franz Bopp in his Über das Albanesische in seinen verwandtschaftlichen Beziehungen (Kurani & Trifoni, 2011), however it was later discussed as an independent branch of Indo-European languages, not as a descended (Kurani & Trifoni, 2011).
The grammar of the Albanian language is very complex and rich, in spite of surviving through many periods of foreign rule and multilingualism. However, this chapter will summarize only the aspect that correlates to word meaning, as our interests in this research are the receptive and expressive skills of hearing impaired Albanian children.
If we analyse the grammar of the Albanian language, then we can notice that the word order in the sentence is relatively free due to the fact that it is an inflectional language, however the most common order is subject (S)-verb (V)-object (O). To say “Agim ate all the oranges” in Albanian, we may use any of the following order, with slight pragmatic differences:
SVO: Agimi i hëngri të gjithë portokallët.
SOV: Agimi të gjithë portokallët i hëngri.
OVS: Të gjithë portokallët i hëngri Agimi.
OSV: Të gjithë portokallët Agimi i hëngri.
VSO: I hëngri Agimi të gjithë portokallët.
20 When we refer to slight pragmatic differences, we are referring to cases when the root of the word does not change, in other cases, the situation changes. For example, two words in Albanian language, vij (come) and shkollë (school), these two words will create a relation among them if we use the preposition në (analogue to to), or the preposition nga (from). In the first case, we will have different meaning from the latter, only with the change of the preposition. However, there are situations when changing the word order can change the whole meaning of the word, the message, for instance Një djalë do një vajzë (A boy loves a girl), and Një vajzë do një djalë (A girl loves a boy), demonstrates that only by changing the word order the meaning changes (Rokaj, 2005).
Albanian nouns are inflected by gender (masculine, feminine and neuter) and number (singular and plural). There are five declensions with six cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and vocative), although the vocative only occurs with a limited number of words, and the forms of the genitive and dative are identical (a genitive is produced when the prepositions i/e/të/së are used with the dative). Some dialects also retain a locative case, which is not present in standard Albanian. The cases apply to both definite and indefinite nouns, and there are numerous cases of syncretism. The following table shows the declension of mal (mountain), a masculine noun which takes "i" in the definite singular (Friedman , 2004):
Indefinite singular
Indefinite plural Definite singular Definite plural
Nominative një mal (a mountain)
male
(mountains)
mali (the mountain)
malet (the mountains)
Accusative një mal Male Malin Malet
Genitive i/e/të/së një mali
i/e/të/së maleve i/e/të/së malit i/e/të/së maleve
Dative një mali Maleve Malit maleve
Ablative (prej) një mali (prej) malesh (prej) malit (prej) maleve
