On the comprehension of passive sentences and relative clauses by a group of hearing impaired adolescents

Deafness is a sensory impairment which affects the acquisition and development of linguistic abilities. Indeed, a damage to the auditory canal prevents deaf people from having direct access to the linguistic input and consequently from having typical language development. This study investigates the comprehension of two Italian linguistic structures - passive sentences and relative clauses - by a group of hearing impared adolescents. Passive sentences included sentences containing transitive reversibile actional verbs and non-actional verbs. The relative clauses examined in this study include subject relatives, object relatives with the embedded subject in the preverbal position and object relatives with subject in the post-verbal position. The data were collected from a group of adolescents attending the I.S.I.S.S. ”A. Magarotto” high school in Padua. The group included eight boys and girls with profound hearing loss and three with severe hearing loss. The subjects ranging in age from 14;7 to 17;8 and all of them use the Italian Sign Language. The majority of them do not use any hearing aids. Results shows that performance of hearing impaired partecipants is comparable to that of younger typically-developing children (aged between 3;6 – 6;6). Furthermore, the performance on the analyzed structures indicates various degrees of comprehension difficulties.