Tomaszewski Piotr, Krzysztofiak Piotr, Morford Jill P, Eźlakowski Wiktor
Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
Faculty of Psychology, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland.
Front Psychol. 2022 May 25;13:896339. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.896339. eCollection 2022.
This study focuses on the relationship between the age of acquisition of Polish Sign Language (PJM) by deaf individuals and their receptive language skills at the phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. Sixty Deaf signers of PJM were recruited into three equal groups ( = 20): (1) a group exposed to PJM from birth from their deaf parents; (2) a group of childhood learners of PJM, who reported learning PJM between 4 and 8 years; (3) a group of adolescent learners of PJM, who reported learning PJM between 9 and 13 years. The PJM Perception and Comprehension Test was used to assess three aspects of language processing: phonological, morphological and syntactic. Participants were asked to decide whether a series of signs and sentences were acceptable in PJM. Results show that the age of PJM acquisition has a significant impact on performance on this task. The earlier deaf people acquire PJM, the more likely they were to distinguish signs and sentences considered permissible and impermissible in PJM by native signers. Native signers had significantly greater accuracy on the phonological, morphological, and syntactic items than either the Childhood or the Adolescent signers. Further, the Childhood signers had significantly greater accuracy than the Adolescent signers on all three parts of the test. Comparing performance on specific structures targeted within each part of the test revealed that multi-channel signs and negative suffixes posed the greatest challenge for Adolescent signers relative to the Native signers. The above results provide evidence from a less-commonly studied signed language that the age of onset of first language acquisition affects ultimate outcomes in language acquisition across all levels of grammatical structure. In addition, this research corroborates prior studies demonstrating that the critical period is independent of language modality. Contrary to a common public health assumption that early exposure to language is less vital to signed than to spoken language development, the results of this study demonstrate that early exposure to a signed language promotes sensitivity to phonological, morphological and syntactic patterns in language.
本研究聚焦于聋人习得波兰手语（PJM）的年龄与其在音系、形态和句法层面的接受性语言技能之间的关系。60名使用PJM的聋人被试被平均分为三组（每组 = 20人）：（1）一组从出生起就由聋人父母接触PJM；（2）一组是PJM的儿童学习者，他们报告在4至8岁之间学习PJM；（3）一组是PJM的青少年学习者，他们报告在9至13岁之间学习PJM。使用PJM感知与理解测试来评估语言处理的三个方面：音系、形态和句法。要求参与者判断一系列手势和句子在PJM中是否可接受。结果表明，PJM的习得年龄对该任务的表现有显著影响。聋人越早习得PJM，就越有可能区分本土手语使用者认为在PJM中允许和不允许的手势和句子。本土手语使用者在音系、形态和句法项目上的准确率显著高于儿童或青少年手语使用者。此外，在测试的所有三个部分中，儿童手语使用者的准确率显著高于青少年手语使用者。比较测试各部分中针对的特定结构的表现发现，相对于本土手语使用者，多通道手势和否定后缀对青少年手语使用者构成了最大挑战。上述结果从一种较少被研究的手语中提供了证据，即第一语言习得的起始年龄会影响语法结构各层面语言习得的最终结果。此外，本研究证实了先前的研究，表明关键期与语言模态无关。与公共卫生领域常见的假设相反，即早期接触语言对手语发展不如对口语发展重要，本研究结果表明，早期接触手语会提高对语言中音系、形态和句法模式的敏感度。
