Use of common morphemes by hearing-impaired children exposed to a system of manual English.

Severely hearing-impaired children (11 boys, 9 girls), whose educational procedures included the use of Seeing Essential English (SEE) were given an experimental task designed to test their use of 8 common inflectional morphemes: plural /s/, possessive /s/, present tense singular /s/, past tense /ed/, present progressive /ing/, adjectival and adverbial /ly/, comparative /er/, and superlative /est/. Each child read 20 sentences composed of primer and first grade level words, and circled 1 of 4 word choices to fill in a missing word in each sentence. All 4 word choices had the same root. Responses were analyzed relative to chronological age, sex, degree of hearing loss, duration of exposure to SEE, reading level, and consistency of teacher usage of SEE. Performance appeared to be most dependent on sex, reading level, and teacher consistency. Although these factors were confounded, results indicate that teacher consistency in usage of SEE may be the major determiner of performance on the task.