Influência da idade de aquisição da língua gestual portuguesa e da língua portuguesa na proficiência gramatical de bilingues surdos

Abstract

The age of bilingual acquisition and its impact on language processing remain subject of debate, despite the defense of an early exposure to language by most of the literature. The Deaf community has become a target of interest due to its heterogeneity, delayed access to language and academic difficulties. This study aims to analyze the influence of age of acquisition (AoA) of Portuguese Sign Language (LGP) and Portuguese (LP) on the syntactic outcome of Written Portuguese (PE) of bilingual deaf people. The sample was comprised by 13 prelingually and profoundly deaf students, attending a degree in PRÓ-LGP from the Catholic University of Portugal, proficient in LGP, their first language (L1) and in LP, their second language (L2). Two syntactic tasks were applied: a sentence to picture matching from the PALPA-P language battery and a grammatical judgement task specifically designed for this study, containing grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with five structures: simple, composed, passive, relative and integrative. Results show that the AoA of L1 had no correlation with the syntactic performance of participants unlike the AoA of L2 which obtained high negative and significant correlations. Other possible variables of influence such as age of deafness detection, hearing status of parents and the age of school entry were also not correlated. The fact that picture tasks elicit learners’ linguistic knowledge may have influenced performance in the matching task. On the other hand, grammatical judgement proved to be a sensitive test once it revealed the students' knowledge of L2’s syntax. Thus, it is concluded that an early AoA of LP is crucial for a good syntactic performance and therefore also for a good academic performance. This data support a balanced bilingual policy and suggest a possible effect of modality, since the early exposure to sign language, which has no written form, appears to be insufficient.

Date of Award	2013
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Alexandre Castro Caldas (Supervisor) & Ana Mineiro (Co-Supervisor)