Analyzing the Interlanguage of Asl Natives

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks go to Jacy, my inspiration, partner, and guide for the duration of this work; to my parents, for simply assuming that I could (and would) do anything I wanted to; to Kathy, for steering me through this process and my college career; and to Lisa, for providing consistent and persistent collaboration. ABSTRACT Deaf students learning English face a unique and daunting array of challenges because of the vast distance between signed ASL and written English. The ICICLE system would provide an automated tutor to address and remedy some of these difficulties. Central to the ICICLE system is the proposed user modeling component, which would parse input and provide tutorial feedback using (a) knowledge of the universal patterns of language acquisition, and (b) records of the individual user's past behavior. In order to develop a model of the syntax of Deaf students learning written English, we undertook this study. Using writing samples gathered from Deaf students that had been scored according to the Test of Written English, we tabulated individual syntactic errors on the sentence level and conducted MANOVA tests and factor analysis. We found differences in the occurrence of errors across proficiency levels based on the MANOVA test. From the factor analysis, we found classes of errors that were most characteristic of the proficiency levels, and which could be used to build a concrete model of the typical user's syntax. Along with others on the ICICLE team, I have conducted the following research into the acquisition process of Deaf students learning written English. This research was motivated by the needs of the ICICLE tool, an automated writing tutor designed to assist Deaf students learning English. In order for the system to represent a particular user and the path of his learning process, we need to know what specific stages the typical user passes through. This research took two forms: we looked first at existing literature on Deaf students learning English to see if previous researchers had found patterns of acquisition. Then, having discovered that we still needed more information, we also undertook to find out for ourselves what those problems might be. In this research, we examined the errors that appear in the writing of a sampling of Deaf students at various stages of acqusition in order to characterize the intermediate syntax that they used. Deaf learners of written English do not have exposure to the language …