Sentence Repetition in Deaf Children with Specific Language Impairment in British Sign Language

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform poorly on sentence repetition tasks across different spoken languages, but until now, this methodology has not been investigated in children who have SLI in a signed language. Users of a natural sign language encode different sentence meanings through their choice of signs and by altering the sequence and inflections of these signs. Grammatical information is expressed through movement and configurational changes of the hands and face. The visual modality thus influences how grammatical morphology and syntax are instantiated. How would language impairment impact on the acquisition of these types of linguistic devices in child signers? We investigated sentence repetition skills in a group of 11 deaf children who display SLI in British Sign Language (BSL) and 11 deaf controls with no language impairment who were matched for age and years of BSL exposure. The SLI group was significantly less accurate on an overall accuracy score, and they repeated lexical items, overall sentence meaning, sign order, facial expressions, and verb morphological structures significantly less accurately than controls. This pattern of language deficits is consistent with the characterization of SLI in spoken languages even though expression is in a different modality. We conclude that explanations of SLI, and of poor sentence repetition by children with this disorder, must be able to account for both the spoken and signed modalities

Correction to: Cluster identification, selection, and description in Cluster randomized crossover trials: the PREP-IT trials

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article

Narrative Strategies of Liberation in Alice Munro

Our stories and the way in which we tell them are not only "self"-constitutive, but also constitutive of our relations with others. Alice Munro's women in The Moons of Jupiter and The Lives of Girls and Women use narrative to seek relief from or understanding of their object position within the microcosmic political system of family and friends. Few succeed. Those who manage to recreate experiences through language (Munro's version of truth) do so through a new configuration of narrative which combines voices and points of view but has no dominant perspective: a communal narrative