This study investigated the hypothesis that delayed first language acquisition impedes syntactic learning in a second language. English syntactic skills of two deaf groups and one control group were investigated. One group of deaf subjects acquired a first language on schedule in early childhood, American Sign Language (ASL), and commenced learning English at school age. The other deaf group had significantly delayed first language acquisition, and began learning both ASL and English at school. Two English tasks were administered, grammatical judgement and syntactic comprehension. The stimuli were grammatical and ungrammatical exemplars of six types of syntactic structure ranging from simple to complex. The results supported the hypothesis and were consistent across all tasks. The delayed, first language learners were significantly less accurate in grammatical judgement and comprehension and significantly slower in response latency. These findings indicate that early first language acquisition is critical for successful second language syntactic learning.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.37519 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Lock, Elizabeth A. (Elizabeth Ann) |
| Contributors | Mayberry, R. I. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (School of Communication Sciences and Disorders.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001548812, proquestno: MQ29745, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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