Browsing by Author "Palmer, Amy"

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    Developing a sentence repetition test for the evaluation of deaf children’s use of South African sign language
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Palmer, Amy; Huddlestone, Kate; Baker, Anne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study creates the first sentence repetition test (SRT) for South African Sign Language (SASL). The test can be used to measure the proficiency of a participant and track their progress over time. The test is easy to administer and score but needs to be adapted to the context within which it will be used. The aim of the test is to provide deaf schools with a language testing instrument, as there is currently no such instrument readily available. The test provides an opportunity to begin creating an image of what deaf children’s SASL language acquisition looks like, of which there is currently very little information. The main research questions of this study were concerned with establishing the most important features necessary for this test and the relationships between the participants’ scores and other variables, such as age and exposure to SASL. An SRT was created with 20 sentences, which were organised into three categories: Simple, Moderate, and Complex. These categories reflected the grammatical complexity of the sentences, as an SRT tests the grammatical knowledge of the participants. This study used data from 40 deaf children between the ages of seven- and nine-years-old. These children had had a minimum of one year of exposure to SASL and were from two schools for the deaf in the Western Cape. The results showed that lexical variation is vital feature influencing language testing. Appropriate grammatical features needed to be used, keeping the age groups of the participants in mind. It was concluded that the age of the children and their lengths of exposure had significant effects on their test results. The older the child and the longer their length of exposure, the higher they scored on the test. The results also found that participants from different schools scored differently on the test, which is possibly a result of the familiarity of language testing and the participant’s familiarity with the administrators of the test. Sentence length had an effect on the results, and the categorisation of the sentences was found to be relatively accurate, with some adjustments necessary for future use of the SRT.