Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students’ Understanding of Causal and Adversative Connectives in Sentence Reading

Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students tend to experience delayed development of grammatical skills in written language. However, much remains unknown about the mechanism behind this phenomenon. In the present study, the researchers used a self-paced moving-window reading task to investigate DHH students’ understanding of causal and adversative connectives in Chinese. The students were similar to a hearing control group in their comprehension of the relationship between the clauses in a causal sentence. However, the DHH students were more likely than their hearing peers to find it harder to understand adversative connectives than causal connectives. More studies are needed to reveal how DHH students deal with other syntactic structures that are particularly difficult for them to learn. Educators should pay close attention to creating learning environments in which DHH students can acquire those syntactic structures in the process of using language.