Anche i sordi stranieri imparano l’italiano vocale: due strategie a confronto

No attention has been paid yet to deaf immigrants and their specific learning needs with a new verbal language. We developed a questionnaire to study deaf students’ learning strategies with the most demanding tasks of the new verbal language, namely morphology. Italian is very rich in inflection and learners cope with its verbal and nominal inflection systems since the first exposure to it. The current study gives evidence that deaf learners having no daily practice of any vocal tongue perform better with single, high-frequency and idiosyncratic items, suggesting they mainly rely upon a learning strategy based on visual memory. Nonetheless, the higher proficient they are in the new verbal language, the more easily they resort on analogical strategies, performing even less accurately with the irregular forms