Linguistic Word Classes in the Spoken Language of Normal, Hard-of-Hearing, and Deaf Children

Abstract

The spoken language of three groups of subjects—normal, hard-of-hearing, and deaf—was analyzed by means of a new classification system devised by Jones, Goodman, and Wepman. Each spoken word was sorted into one of 14 word classes. Group means for each word class were compared. It was concluded that a significant hearing impairment reduces productivity of both tokens and types of words. A moderate impairment lowers the use of adverbs, pronouns, and auxiliaries; a profound impairment reduces nearly all classes. In proportion to total word output the deaf overused nouns and articles, underused prepositions, quantifiers, and indefinites.