The Acquisition of Syntactic Rules of Japanese Sign Language in Young Children

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24530821
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Educational psychology
• Research Institution: Nara University of Education
• Principal Investigator: URYU Yoshiko 奈良教育大学, 教育学部, 教授 (20259469)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 聴覚障害児 / 手話の早期導入 / コード・ブレンディング / 手話の統語構造 / 文末の指さし

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Study 1 analyzed utterances of a 3-year-old hard of hearing girl during tutorial sessions with her hearing teacher who could use sign language. The girl, who had severe hearing loss, could speak with natural intonation of oral speech with a hearing aid. Twenty-eight spontaneous utterances were obtained during about 40 minute session. Eight utterances were either oral or signed. Of other 20 utterances, 8 showed the perfect correspondence between spoken words and signs. The rest showed the difference between them. Among them 3 sentences accompanied a pointing at the end of them, which showed natural expression for sign language but was redundant and was unnatural word order for Japanese. These non-correspondent bimodal code-blending utterances suggest that for young deaf children who uses oral and sign modes, they may acquire two modes separately. Study 2 discussed the early childhood education and care for deaf children with sign language.

Free Research Field

発達心理学