Acquisition Of Lexical And Grammatical Categories Of The Aspect Of Brazilian Sign Language: Deaf Children With And Without Cochlear Implant

Abstract

The present study investigates the acquisition of the aspectual category of two deaf children, one of whom underwent cochlear implant (CI) surgery. Our question is whether the hypotheses raised by Silva (2010) to explain the process of acquisition of aspectual category of a deaf children also apply to the deaf child who has a CI. The present study is based on both Comrie (1976) and Finau (2004), who focused on lexical and grammatical aspects and the opposition between perfective and imperfective. Our research is spontaneous in nature; we investigated children whose pseudonyms were ANA and BRUNO. Both are deaf children of deaf parents and were acquired Libras (Brazilian Sign Language) as their first language. ANA and BRUNO were filmed over three years; the data are part of the corpus of the research group on the acquisition of Brazilian Sign Language at UFSC, which is coordinated by Ronice Muller de Quadros. The transcription of data was carried out using the notation Sistema de Notação por Palavras (FELIPE, 1998). In the analysis, we observed that ANA as well as BRUNO produced, predominantly, the perfective lexical aspect; we also observed that the grammatical aspect of the productions occur via bending. These inflections occur through morphological change (movement); and they are mostly perfective. Our results show that a deaf child who has spoken language stimulation, through the presence of CI, and therefore, a bilingual/bimodal orientation, has the same linguistic category aspectual production in Libras as a Libras monolingual user. The hypotheses that explain the process of acquisition of aspectual category of a deaf child presented in Silva (2010) also apply to a deaf child with deaf parents and who has a CI.