Using a Sentence Repetition Task in French Sign Language : a new approach to assess LSF abilities

Caroline Bogliotti (1) , Céline Fortuna (1) , Aliyah Morgenstern (2)

1 MoDyCo - Modèles, Dynamiques, Corpus
2 PRISMES - PRISMES - Langues, Textes, Arts et Cultures du Monde Anglophone - EA 4398

Sign-language assignment has been an issue for 15 years. Several tools in different sign languages have been created, and each of them has a specific goal : assessment of sign language as a first language, sign language as a L2, lexical development, cognitive abilities, etc. (Haug, 2008. http://www.signlang-assessment.info). Actually, there is no available test, which assesses LSF. As a consequence, researchers, teachers and therapists have not reliable benchmarks about LSF acquisition, and doesn’t know how assess linguistic skills in an efficient way. So, in the wake of Courtin’s work on LSF assessment (2010), and other sign-language assessment tools, our general goal is to develop a series of tests to assess linguistic abilities in LSF. Among the numerous tasks, which allow us to evaluate language skills, Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) seems relevant to sign languages. Often used in Vocal Languages (VL), SRT enables to obtain a good representation of language abilities while being quick to be administered and easy to score. If this task is successful in adults, children tend to fail because their phonological skills and linguistic representations are not strong enough (Mason et al, 2010). This task is also considered as a relatively reliable marker of language development and language processing (Chiat et al., 2013). In addition, a poor performance on the task is considered as a typical marker of Specific Language Impairment (for VL, Conti-Ramsden et al., 2001; for SL, see Marshall et al., 2015). The aim of the present study is twofold: first, we’ll present the new Sentence Repetition Task elaborated in LSF; second, we’ll present data in the SRT collected in a transversal way. Thirty-five deaf children, aged from 4.2 years old to 10.8 y.o, were tested on their repetition abilities. All children were native signers, have been exposed to LSF at birth, and have no history of language disorders. The children were to repeat 15 sign sentences from a video produced by a French native adult signer. The dependant variable was the comparison between the children’s repetitions and the production to the native signer. We thus obtain quantification of phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical errors in the children productions. As expected, our data showed better repetition ability in the older children. For younger children, while their repetition performance were quite good, they showed more sign omissions, unfinished sentences, inaccurate phonological parameters and errors in morphosyntactic localisations. These results are discussed in terms of developmental stages of LSF acquisition and its mastery. In addition, these data constitute a first step for providing a normative database. Further investigations will aim to combine these repetition data with narrative production of a cartoon. Another interesting perspective will be to test some children with atypical acquisition as late signers and children with Specific Language Impairment. This work is in progress.

Mots clés: language assessment; sign language acquisition; sentence repetition task; LSF

Domaines: Linguistique

Caroline Bogliotti, Céline Fortuna, Aliyah Morgenstern. Using a Sentence Repetition Task in French Sign Language : a new approach to assess LSF abilities. FEAST17, Jun 2017, Reykjavick, Iceland. 2017. ⟨halshs-01547067⟩