A Study of the Comprehension of Verb-Particle Combinations Among Deaf and Hearing Subjects

175 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1982.The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which deaf and hearing subjects could understand verb-particle combinations of English. A written task of 64 multiple-choice items was developed to assess the subjects' performance at three levels of semantic difficulty and in five syntactic surface structures.The instrument was administered to 45 deaf subjects between the ages of 10 and 19 years, and 45 hearing subjects between the ages of 8 and 12 years. Each deaf subject had a sensorineural hearing impairment of not less than 90 db (ANSI) in the better ear within the speech range--500, 1000, 2000 Hz--prior to the age of two years. Subjects in both groups had IQs within the normal range.Analyses of variance indicated that the hearing subjects scored significantly higher than the deaf subjects on all levels of semantic difficulty and in all syntactic surface structures. Analyses of simple main effects and Scheffe contrasts indicated similar orders of difficulty for both groups. For both groups as the semantic level approached the idiomatic dimension, the combinations were significantly more difficult. For the deaf subjects, the semantic surface structure of most difficulty was that in which the particle was separated from the verb.This investigation has suggested the need for special instruction and materials to teach these structures to deaf students and the need for an awareness on the part of teachers and instructor trainers of the idiomatic nature of these combinations and their various syntactic and semantic properties.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD