Ability of Deaf Children to Use Different Word Classes

Abstract

A completion test based on 90 sentences sampled from second-grade readers was devised. One word was omitted from each sentence, the omitted word being chosen so that four lexical classes and six function word groups were each sampled nine times. Restorations of these omissions by 30 deaf children and 30 hearing children with similar reading ability were compared. Although the hearing children were generally more successful in restoring the omitted words, the patterns of difficulty of the different form classes were remarkably similar for the two groups.