Grammar Structures and Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students: A Review of Past Performance and a Report of New Findings

Results of a Study are presented that suggest the grammatical structures of English some deaf and hard of hearing students struggle to acquire. A review of the literature from the past 40 years is presented, exploring particular lexical and morphosyntactic areas in which deaf and hard of hearing children have traditionally exhibited difficulty. Twenty-six participants from an urban day school for the deaf used the LanguageLinks software, produced by Laureate Learning Systems, for 10 minutes daily for 9 weeks. The descriptive analysis of the results expands on findings reported by Cannon, Easterbrooks, Gagne, and . The results indicated that many participants struggled with regular noun singular/plural; accusative first- and second-person singular; noun/verb agreement copular “be”; accusative third-person number/gender; locative pronominals; auxiliary “be”/regular past “–ed;” and prenominal determiners plural.