The Comprehension of Sentences Derived by Syntactic Movement in Palestinian Arabic-Speaking Children with Hearing Impairment

Sentence and text comprehension is known to be difficult for orally-trained individuals with hearing impairment. This study explored the comprehension of several syntactic structures that are especially difficult for them, and may lead to considerable comprehension difficulties. Ten structures derived by Wh-movement were tested, some of them for the first time in hearing-impairment: 5 types of relative-clauses, 3 types of Wh-questions, and 2 types of topicalized structures, compared with 2 types of simple sentences. Experiment 1 tested subject and object-relatives using a sentence-picture matching task. Experiment 2 tested subject-questions and object-questions using a picture-selection task. Experiment 3 tested subjectand object-relatives using comprehension questions. Experiment 4 tested subjectand object-relatives and topicalized sentences using a reading-and-paraphrasing task. The participants were 24 orally-trained Palestinian-Arabic-speaking individuals, 21 of them had mild-to-profound binaural hearing loss, and 3 had monaural hearing loss. The participants with binaural hearing impairment, who were not sufficiently exposed to language input during the first year of life, failed to understand object-relatives, object-questions, and topicalization in SV and VS orders in both Palestinian-Arabic and Standard-Arabic. In some tasks they even had difficulty understanding subject-relatives and subject-questions. The monaurally hearing-impaired performed similarly to the controls on all tasks.