Séminaire P3 avec Esther Ruigendijk (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg)

Nous aurons le plaisir d'accueillir Esther Ruigendijk, Professeure en Linguistique Néerlandaise, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg (Allemagne). Son séminaire aura pour titre : "Morphosyntactic abilities in children with hearing loss".

Le jeudi 25 septembre 2025, de 14h00 à 16h (en zoom et en C228)

Abstract

Morphosyntactic abilities in children with hearing loss

Children with hearing impairment (HI) show disorders in syntax and morphology. The question is whether and how these disorders are connected to problems in the auditory domain. In this talk, I will address whether moderate to severe hearing loss at a young age affects the ability of German-speaking school-aged and orally trained children to understand and produce sentences. The study focuses on sentence structures that are derived by syntactic movement (e.g. relative clauses, wh-questions, topicalization), which have been identified as a sensitive marker for syntactic impairment in other languages and in other populations with syntactic impairment. It further examines the ability to use morphosyntactic marking, such as case and agreement morphology in children with hearing loss. I will present data from sentence picture matching, sentence repetition as well as an eye tracking study. Our results clearly showed that, although there is high interindividual variability, most of the participants with HI had considerable difficulties in the comprehension and repetition of sentences with syntactic movement: they had significant difficulties understanding object relatives, Wh-questions, and topicalized sentences, and in the repetition of object who and which questions and subject relatives, as well as in sentences with verb movement to second sentential position. An additional important outcome of the study is that not all sentence structures are impaired—passive structures were not problematic for most of the HI children. Furthermore, case morphology seemed more affected than agreement morphology, at least in comprehension. These data show that morphosyntactic abilities may be impaired and/or can take longer to be acquired in children with hearing loss, even in children who have been diagnosed and aided (with hearing aids or Cis) at a young age.