Metalinguistic Abilities of Young Hearing-Impaired Children: Performance on a Judgment of Synonymy Task

Metalinguistic abilities of 20 hearing-impaired children between the ages of 4 and 10 years were assessed in this study. Children were asked to judge synonymy of sentence pairs presented in Signed English, Pidgin Sign English, and American Sign Language. Results indicated that none of these children had developed metalinguistic abilities in any of the sign language systems available to them. Sentence pairs with different meanings were easier than synonymous pairs, which suggests that their metalinguistic abilities are developing in a pattern similar to that of hearing children. Females performed significantly better than males.