Abstract

OTAROLA-CORNEJO, Fabiola Andrea; PEREZ-CUELLO, Andrea; ALVAREZ-CRUZ, Martín  and  ORTIZ-NAVARRETE, Natalia. Verbal construction in narratives produced by deaf students who use Chilean Sign Language. Íkala [online]. 2020, vol.25, n.2, pp.395-416.  Epub Apr 01, 2021. ISSN 0123-3432.  https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ikala.v25n02a04.

The research work reported here aimed to describe the lexical verb forms as discursive-grammatical resources present in personal experience narratives by Chilean sign language users. In order to do that, qualitative methodology was used, with data being gathered in ecologically true spaces, under a descriptive cross-sectional research design. The linguistic corpus was made up of 42 narrative texts, produced by 14 hearing-impaired students, with different trajectories of immersion in the sign language. 1052 lexical verb forms were identified, with the more frequently seen were whole verb forms, and the least frequently seen were spatial verb forms. The students with longer linguistic experience use more verb forms. This is leveraged if and when participants have higher education. These results suggest that the deeper the immersion in sign language, the better the psycho-linguistic performance could be in deaf students, which has social and educational implications for deaf people development. On the other hand, this study contributes to describe Chilean sign language and puts forward the earliest guidelines for its study and acquisition. Furthermore, it contributes to training processes for both deaf people and teachers and professionals working in the classroom.

Keywords : lexical verb forms; narratives; sign language; Chilean sign language; deaf students.

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